It was a merry party which the New York train carried to Shannondale the next day, and Jerrie was the merriest and gayest of them all, bandying jokes and jests, and coquetting pretty equally with the young men, until neither Tom, nor Dick, nor Billy quite knew what he was doing or saying.  But always in her gayest moods, when her eyes were brightest and her wit the keenest, there was in Jerrie’s heart a thought of Harold, who had so disappointed her, and a wonder as to the nature of the job which had been of sufficient importance to keep him from Vassar.

‘Shingling a roof, and Maude is helping him,’ Billy said, ’I wonder what he meant?’ she was thinking, when she heard Ann Eliza cry out, that the towers of ‘Le Bateau’ were visible.

As she had not seen that wonderful structure since its completion, she arose from her seat, and going to the window, looked out upon the massive pile in the distance, looking, with its turrets, and towers, and round projections, like some old castle rather than a home where people could live and be happy.

‘It is very grand,’ she said to Ann Eliza; and Billy, who was leaning toward her, replied: 

’Yes, too grand for a Pe-Peterkin.  It wants you, there, Jerrie, as its m-m-master-p-p-piece, and, by Jove, you can b-be there, too, if you will!’

No one heard this attempt at an offer but Jerrie, who, with a saucy toss of the head, replied, laughingly: 

’Thank you, Billy.  I’ll think of it, and let you know when I make up my mind to come.  Just now I prefer the cottage in the lane to any spot on earth.  Oh, here, we are at the station,’ she cried, as the train shot round a curve and Shannondale was reached.

There was a scrambling for bundles, and flowers, and wraps.  Fred Raymond gathering up Nina’s, while Dick, and Tom, and Billy, almost fought over Jerrie’s, and poor little Ann Eliza would have carried hers alone if Jerrie had not helped her.

CHAPTER XXVIII.

IN SHANNONDALE.

Nine years of change in Shannondale, and the green hill-side, which stretched from the common down to the river where, when our story opened, sheep and cows were feeding in the pasture land, is thickly covered with houses of every kind of architecture, from the Mansard roof to the Queen Anne style, just coming into fashion, while the meadow lands are dotted over with the small houses of the men who work in the large furnace, or manufactory, which Peterkin had bought and enlarged, as a monument, he said, and where he sometimes employed as many as four hundred men, and had set up a whistle which could be heard for miles and miles, and nearly blew off the chimney-tops when it sounded in the morning at six o’clock, it was so loud and shrill.  A screecher, Peterkin called it, and he always listened with a smile of pride and satisfaction on his face when he heard the first indications of its blowing, and knew that four hundred men were quickening their stops on account of it, lest they should be a few minutes late and have their wages docked.