Martin Cortright appeared some five minutes before Horace Bradford.  As it chanced, when the latter came in the door Sylvia was on the stairs, so that her greeting and hearty handshake were given looking down at him, and she waited in the hall, in a perfectly unembarrassed way, as a matter of course, while he freed himself from his heavy coat.  His glance at the tall girl, who came down from the darkness above, in her shimmering gown, with golden daffies in her hair and on her breast, like a beam of wholesome sunshine, was full of honest, personal admiration.  If it had been otherwise I should have been disappointed in the man’s completeness.  Then, looking at them from out of the library shadows, I wondered what he would have thought if his entry had been at the Latham home instead of at Miss Lavinia’s, how he would have passed the ordeal of Perkins, Potts, and Parker, and if his spontaneity would have been marred by the formality.

Perhaps he would have been oblivious.  Some men have the happy gift of not being annoyed by things that are thorns in the flesh to otherwise quite independent women.  Father, however, is always amused by flunkies, and treats them as an expected part of the show; even as the jovial Autocrat did when, at a grand London house, “it took full six men in red satin knee-breeches” to admit him and his companion.

Bradford did not wear an evening suit; neither did he deem apology necessary.  If he thought of the matter at all, which I doubt, he evidently considered that he was among friends, who would make whatever excuses were necessary from the circumstances of his hurried trip.

Then we went in to the dining-room, Miss Lavinia leading with Martin Cortright, as the most recent acquaintance, and therefore formal guest, the rest of us following in a group.  Miss Lavinia, of course, took the head of the table, Evan opposite, and the two men, Cortright on her right and Bradford on her left, making Sylvia and me vis-a-vis.

The men appropriated their buttonhole flowers naturally.  Martin smiled at my choice for him, which was a small, but chubby, red and yellow, uncompromising Dutch tulip, far too stout to be able to follow its family habit of night closing, except to contract itself slightly.  Evan caressed his lilies-of-the-valley lightly with his finger-tips as he fastened them in place, but Bradford broke into a boyish laugh, and then blushed to the eyes, when he saw the tiny bunch of primroses, saying:  “You have a long memory, Miss Sylvia, yet mine is longer.  May I have a sprig of that, too?” and he reached over a big-boned hand to where the greenhouse-bred wands of yellow Forsythia were laid in a formal pattern bordering the paths.  “That is the first flower that I remember.  A great bush of it used to grow in a protected spot almost against the kitchen window at home; and when I see a bit of it in a strange place, for a minute I collapse into the little chap in outrageous gathered trousers, who used to reach out the window for the top twigs, that blossomed earliest, so as to be the first to carry ‘yellow bells’ to school for a teacher that I used to think was Venus and Minerva rolled in one.  I saw her in Boston the other day, and the Venus hallucination is shattered, but the yellow bells look just the same, proving—­”