Prof.  Lord was not satisfied with Mrs. Carey’s tone.  It was so maternal that he expected at any moment she might brush his hair, straighten his necktie, and beg him not to sit up too late, but his instinct told him it was the only tone he was ever likely to hear from her, and so he said reluctantly, “Very well; I confess that I really rely on your judgment, and I will decline the invitation.”

“I think you are right,” Mrs. Carey answered, wondering if the man would ever see his duty with his own eyes, or whether he had deliberately blinded himself for life.

XXXV

THE CRIMSON RAMBLER

While Mrs. Carey was talking with Mr. Lord, Nancy skimmed across the barn floor intent on some suddenly remembered duty, went out into the garden, and met face to face a strange young man standing by the rose trellis and looking in at the dance through the open door.

He had on a conventional black dinner-coat, something never seen in Beulah, and wore a soft travelling cap.  At first Nancy thought he was a friend of the visiting fiddler, but a closer look at his merry dark eyes gave her the feeling that she had seen him before, or somebody very like him.  He did not wait for her to speak, but taking off his cap, put out his hand and said:  “By your resemblance to a photograph in my possession I think you are the girl who planted the crimson rambler.”

“Are you ’my son Tom’?” asked Nancy, open astonishment in her tone.  “I mean my Mr. Hamilton’s son Tom?”

“I am my Mr. Hamilton’s son Tom; or shall we say our Mr. Hamilton’s?  Do two ‘mys’ make one ’our’?”

“Upon my word, wonders will never cease!” exclaimed Nancy.  “The Admiral said you were in Boston, but he never told us you would visit Beulah so soon!”

“No, I wanted it to be a secret.  I wanted to appear when the ball was at its height; the ghost of the old regime confronting the new, so to speak.”

“Beulah will soon be a summer resort; everybody seems to be coming here.”

“It’s partly your fault, isn’t it?”

“Why, pray?”

“‘The Water Babies’ is one of my favorite books, and I know all about Mother Carey’s chickens.  They go out over the seas and show good birds the way home.”

“Are you a good bird?” asked Nancy saucily.

“I’m home, at all events!” said Tom with an emphasis that made Nancy shiver lest the young man had come to Beulah with a view of taking up his residence in the paternal mansion.

The two young people sat down on the piazza steps while the music of The Sultan’s Polka floated out of the barn door.  Old Mrs. Jenks was dancing with Peter, her eighty-year-old steps as fleet as his, her white side-curls bobbing to the tune.  Her withered hands clasped his dimpled ones and the two seemed to be of the same age, for in the atmosphere of laughter and goodwill there would have been no place for the old in heart, and certainly Mrs. Jenks was as young as any one at the party.