"I don't know just what it is, my dear," he once said, musingly. "Possibly the familiar furniture, or the presence of Ellen Neal (quite a fair cook, Dollykins, though her manner leaves something to be desired). But somehow in this little establishment of yours I always feel as if--well, as if Mary were about somewhere." He sighed sentimentally. "I feel as if she might at any moment sit down beside us and take out a bit of sewing. She was rarely without sewing, you remember?" "I remember." Joan patted his hand, a demonstration rare with her. "I am glad you feel that way, Father. Mother always does seem very close to me--especially just now." An odd feeling of sorriness for her step-mother came over Joan. "You are sure," she asked on an impulse, "that Effie May does not object to your coming here so much without her?" "Object? To my visiting my daughter under her own vine and figtree? It would hardly be within her province to object," he commented regally. "But, as it happens, she is the one who frequently suggests my visits. She quite understands that under the--er, the happy circumstances--you cannot come much to us, not caring naturally to appear any more often than is necessary in public." The Major adhered rigorously to every tenet of the old school. He had recently presented his daughter with a low, comfortable phaeton of the sort which, as he explained, the gentlewomen of his day were accustomed to drive; and Pegasus was learning to adapt herself demurely to the rôle of a family horse. Joan found this phaeton a great convenience for shopping and marketing and her rare visiting (she saw very little of her friends that summer); and in the evening she and Archie went for long drives about the parks, covering less ground than they had covered in the ill-fated Lizzie, but making up for this by a more intimate knowledge of what they passed. "It's good to go slowly enough now and then to see the wayside flowers, and smell the fern, and hear the bird-calls, isn't it?" she said once as they jogged along. "Sure it is! Now and then," replied Archie guardedly. A rising young business man of the present time could hardly be expected to find phaetoning an exhilarating means of locomotion. But "anything goes just now," as he said to himself, happily. He was not able to take as many of these drives with her as he should have liked. The cares of business were beginning to sit upon him with increasing heaviness. "A man's business has got to grow with his family," he was fond of saying, importantly; and Joan was left alone sometimes, even on Saturday afternoons and after supper in the evenings--those periods sacred in these our States to the uses of domesticity.