contemporary affairs. The daughter was often not a little amused at
Graham's blank looks as her father broached topics of American
interest which to the student from abroad were as little known or
understood as the questions which might have been agitating the
inhabitants of Jupiter. Most ladies would have been politely oblivious
of her guest's blunders and infelicitous remarks, but Miss St. John
had a frank, merry way of recognizing them, and yet malice and
ridicule were so entirely absent from her words and ways that Graham
soon positively enjoyed being laughed at, and much preferred her
delicate open raillery, which gave him a chance to defend himself, to
a smiling mask that would leave him in uncertainty as to the fitness
of his replies. There was a subtle flattery also in this course, for
she treated him as one capable of holding his own, and not in need of
social charity and protection. With pleasure he recognized that she
was adopting toward him something of the same sportive manner which
characterized her relations with his aunt, and which also indicated
that as Mrs. Mayburn's nephew he had met with a reception which would
not have been accorded to one less favorably introduced.

How vividly in after years Graham remembered that rainy May morning!
He could always call up before him, like a vivid picture, the old
major with his bushy white eyebrows and piercing black eyes, the smoke
from his meerschaum creating a sort of halo around his gray head, the
fine, venerable face often drawn by pain which led to half-muttered
imprecations that courtesy to his guest and daughter could not wholly
suppress. How often he saw again the fire curling softly from the
hearth with a contented crackle, as if pleased to be once more an
essential to the home from which the advancing summer would soon
banish it! He could recall every article of the furniture with which
he afterward became so familiar. But that which was engraven on his