the gold-fish, at whose brim we had plighted our vows, and so we
came to the wistaria-smothered porch.

The door was wide open, and she walked in before me. "Guess who
has come to see us!" she cried.

Her father answered indistinctly from the parlor, and a chair
creaked. I judged he was disturbed in his nap.

"Mother!" she called in her clear young voice. "Puss!"

Puss was her sister.

She told them in a marveling key that I had walked all the way from
Clayton, and they gathered about me and echoed her notes of surprise.

"You'd better sit down, Willie," said her father; "now you have got
here. How's your mother?"

He looked at me curiously as he spoke.

He was dressed in his Sunday clothes, a sort of brownish tweeds, but
the waistcoat was unbuttoned for greater comfort in his slumbers.
He was a brown-eyed ruddy man, and I still have now in my mind the
bright effect of the red-golden hairs that started out from his
cheek to flow down into his beard. He was short but strongly built,
and his beard and mustache were the biggest things about him. She
had taken all the possibility of beauty he possessed, his clear
skin, his bright hazel-brown eyes, and wedded them to a certain
quickness she got from her mother. Her mother I remember as