although so dear. The old lady kissed both the aunt and the niece
when they at last went out of the door, and said she was so glad that
she was at home, and begged them to come again. She stood in the door
watching them get into the coach. The young girl's face in the
window, with her beflowered hat, a rose crowned with roses, in the
dark setting of the window, was beautiful. Even the aunt's face,
older and more colorless, except for an unlovely flush of excitement,
was pathetically compelling and charmed. Mrs. Anderson, filling up
the doorway with her stately bulk, swept around by her soft black
draperies, her fair old face rising from a foam of lace, and
delicately capped with lace, on which was a knot of palest lavender,
stood in a frame of luxuriant Virginia-creeper, and smiled and nodded
graciously to her departing guests, while wondering if they would
meet her son coming home. After that followed a reflection as to the
undesirability of either of them as a possible daughter-in-law.

Just as she was turning to enter the house, after the coach had
rolled out of sight, she saw her son coming down the street under the
green shade of the maples which bordered it. The mother went toddling
on her tiny feet down the steps to the gate to meet her son. The
house stood quite close to the road; indeed, only a little
bricked-path separated it from the sidewalk. All the ground was at
the sides and back. The house was a square old affair with a row of
half-windows in the third-story, or attic, and considerable good old
panel-work and ornamentation about it. On the right side of the house
was a large old flower-garden, now just beginning to assert itself
anew; on the left were the stable and some out-buildings, with a
grassy oval of lawn in the centre of a sweep of drive; in the rear
was a kitchen-garden and a field rising to the railroad, for
railroads circled all Banbridge in their vises of iron arms. A