"I'm sure I don't know what you mean," she said, indifferently. "Where is
your hotel? In Boston--New York--Chicago?"

"It's in the country--it's a summer hotel," he said, as before.

She looked away from him toward the other room. "There's my brother. I
didn't know he was coming."

"Shall I go and tell him where you are?" Jeff asked, following the
direction of her eyes.

"No, no; he can find me," said the girl, sinking back in her chair again.
He left her to resume the talk where she chose, and she said: "If it's
something ancestral, of course--"

"I don't know as it's that, exactly. My grandfather used to keep a
country tavern, and so it's in the blood, but the hotel I mean is
something that we've worked up into from a farm boarding-house."

"You don't talk like a country person," the girl broke in, abruptly.

"Not in Cambridge. I do in the country."

"And so," she prompted, "you're going to turn it into a hotel when you've
got out of Harvard."

"It's a hotel already, and a pretty big one; but I'm going to make the
right kind of hotel of it when I take hold of it."