He was to have come earlier in the month, but a singular circumstance prevented.  The old-time gentlewoman, at whose house in Irving Place he has had his apartments so long that a change seemed impossible, died, and he was obliged not only to move, but put his precious belongings in storage until he can place himself suitably once more.  So that his plan of coming here bridges the break, and seems quite providential.

He and father walk up and down the garden together after dinner, smoking and chatting, and it does me good to see dear daddy with one of his old-time friends.  I think I am only now realizing what he, with his sociable disposition, gave up in all those years before Evan came, that I should not be alone, and that he might be all in all to me.

It was quite cool yesterday.  We had hearth fires all through the house, and Martin, rearranging some reference books for his own convenience in the little room that is an annex to father’s library, wore his skull cap and Chinese silk dressing gown, which gave him an antique air quite at variance with his clear skin and eyes.

Lavinia Dorman had been due all the week, but worry with the workmen who are building in the rear of her house detained her, and she telegraphed me that she would take the morning express, and asked me to meet her over in town.  So I drove in myself, dropping father at the hospital on the way, but on reaching the station the train brought me no passenger.

I returned home, hoping to be in time for our way train, thinking I had mistaken her message, and missed it; but the postmistress,—­for every strange face is noticed in town,—­told me that the lady who visited me two weeks ago walked up from the ten o’clock train; that she had a new bonnet and “moved right spry,” and asked if she was a relative of mine.  “An aunt, maybe, and was the pleasant new gentleman an uncle, and did he write a newspaper?  She thought maybe he did because he was so particular about his mail.”  I said something about their being adopted relations, and hurried home.

The boys were industriously digging dandelions on the side lawn.  I inconsistently let the dear, cheery flowers grow and bloom their fill in the early season, when they lie close to the sward, but when they begin to stretch awkward, rubbery necks, and gape about as if to see where they might best shake out their seed puffs, they must be routed.  Do it as thoroughly as possible, enough always remain to repay my cruelty with a shower of golden coin the next spring.  Bertel spends all his spare time on the other bits of grass, but the side lawn is the boys’ plunder, where, by patiently working each day at grubbing out the roots at twenty-five cents a hundred, they expect, before the dandelion season is over, to amass wealth enough to buy an alluring red goat harness trimmed with bells that is on exhibition at the harness shop in town, for Corney Delaney.  Yes, they said, Aunt Lavinia had just come, but she said they need not stop, for she could go in by herself.