The sun set flaming red, behind the Beulah hills.  The frogs sang in the pond by the House of Lords, and the grasshoppers chirped in the long grass of Mother Hamilton’s favorite hayfield.  Then the moon, round and deep-hued as a great Mandarin orange, came up into the sky from which the sun had faded, and the little group still sat on the side piazza, talking.  Nothing but their age and size kept the Carey chickens out of Mr. Hamilton’s lap, and Peter finally went to sleep with his head against the consul’s knee.  He was a “lappy” man, Nancy said next morning; and indeed there had been no one like him in the family circle for many a long month.  He was tender, he was gay, he was fatherly, he was interested in all that concerned them; so no wonder that he heard all about Gilbert’s plans for earning money, and Nancy’s accepted story.  No wonder he exclaimed at the check for ten dollars proudly exhibited in payment, and no wonder he marvelled at the Summer Vacation School in the barn, where fourteen little scholars were already enrolled under the tutelage of the Carey Faculty.  “I never wanted to go to anything in my life as much as I want to go to that school!” he asserted.  “If I could write a circular as enticing as that, I should be a rich man.  I wish you’d let me have some new ones printed, girls, and put me down for three evening lectures; I’d do almost anything to get into that Faculty.”  “I wish you’d give the lectures for the benefit of the Faculty, that would be better still,” said Kitty.  “Nancy’s coming-out party was to be in the barn this summer; that’s one of the things we’re earning money for; or at least we make believe that it is, because it’s so much more fun to work for a party than for coal or flour or meat!”

A look from Mrs. Carey prevented the children from making any further allusions to economy, and Gilbert skillfully turned the subject by giving a dramatic description of the rise and fall of The Dirty Boy, from its first appearance at his mother’s wedding breakfast to its last, at the house-warming supper.

After Lemuel Hamilton had gone back to the little country hotel he sat by the open window for another hour, watching the moonbeams shimmering on the river and bathing the tip of the white meeting-house steeple in a flood of light.  The air was still and the fireflies were rising above the thick grass and carrying their fairy lamps into the lower branches of the feathery elms.  “Haying” would begin next morning, and he would be wakened by the sharpening of scythes and the click of mowing machines.  He would like to work in the Hamilton fields, he thought, knee-deep in daisies,—­fields on whose grass he had not stepped since he was a boy just big enough to go behind the cart and “rake after.”  What an evening it had been!  None of them had known it, but as a matter of fact they had all scaled Shiny Wall and had been sitting with Mother Carey in Peacepool; that was what had made everything so beautiful!  Mr. Hamilton’s last glimpse of the Careys had been the group at the Yellow House gate.  Mrs. Carey, with her brown hair shining in the moonlight leaned against Gilbert, the girls stood beside her, their arms locked in hers, while Peter clung sleepily to her hand.