Suddenly Isabelle clapped her hands.  “I have it!” she cried.  “Send her up to Aunt Marthe, and then we can tease Papa to let us go to Newport.  Marion is going to spend the summer with Christine Drayton, you know, and Papa does not intend to leave the city, so we can persuade him that it is our duty to seize such a golden opportunity of doing things economically.  I am sure I don’t know what people must think of us, never going to any of the fashionable places.  For my part I think we owe it to Papa’s position to keep up with the world.”

“I believe it might be managed,” said Mrs. Hildreth after some consideration.  “It was very clever of you to think of it, Isabelle.  You ought to be a diplomat, my dear,” and she smiled approvingly on her daughter.

* * * * *

The train swept along through the picturesque Vermont scenery and Evadne looked out of her window with never ending delight.

“I am like a poor, lonely bird,” she said to herself, “who flits from shore to shore, seeking rest and finding none.  Another journey in the dark!  I wonder what will be at the end of this one?  Well, I’ll hope for the best.  Aunt Marthe’s letter was kind, and her name sounds as cheery as Aunt Kate’s sounds cold.”

Mr. Everidge came to meet her as the train steamed into the little station, and Evadne soon found herself seated in a comfortable carriage behind a handsome chestnut mare, bowling along a fragrant country road, catching glimpses at every turn of the verdure-clad hills.

She found her new uncle very pleasant.  There was a silver-tongued suavity about him in striking contrast to the growing preoccupation of Judge Hildreth, and a sort of airy self complaisance which took it for granted that he should be well treated by the world.

“I am very glad you have come, my dear niece,” he said, “to relieve the tedium of our uneventful existence.  You must let our Vermont air kiss the roses into bloom again in your pale cheeks.  It has a world-wide reputation as a tonic.  I hope you left our Marlborough relatives in a pleasant attitude of mind?  It is one of the evidences of this progressive age that you should woo ‘tired Nature’s sweet restorer’ one night under the roof of my respected brother-in-law, the next under my own.  The ancients, with their primitive modes of laborious transit, were only half alive.  We of to-day, thanks to the melodious tea-kettle and inventive cerebral tissue of the youthful Watt, live in a perpetual hand-clasp, so to speak, and, by means of the flashing chain of light which girdles the globe are kept in touch with the world.  It is food for reflection that the thought which is evolved from the shadowy recesses of our brain to-day, should be, by the mysterious camera of electricity, photographed upon the retina of the Australian public to-morrow, and we need to have the archives of our memory enlarged to hold the voluminous correspondence of the century.