It was Jack who suggested this trip, which he thought would benefit them all, and early in May they sailed for Europe, taking Ruby with them, not in any sense as a waiting maid, as some ill-natured ones suggested, but as a companion to Amy, and as the friend who had been so kind to Eloise in her need.

That summer Howard was a conspicuous figure at a fashionable watering place with his fast horse and stylish buggy, and every other appearance of wealth and luxury.  He had received his twenty thousand dollars and more, too, for Eloise was disposed to be very generous toward him, and Amy assented to whatever she suggested.

“I’ll have one good time and spend a whole year’s interest if I choose,” he said, and he had a good time and made love to a little Western heiress, whose eyes were like those of Eloise, and first attracted him to her, and who before the season was over promised to be his wife.

Just before she left for Europe Eloise brought her grandmother, Mrs. Smith, from Mayville, and established her in Crompton Place as its mistress, but that good woman had little to say, and allowed the servants to have their way in everything.  The change from her quiet home to all the grandeur and ceremony of the Crompton House did not suit her, and she returned, like Jakey, to her household gods when the family came back in the spring.

* * * * *

Several years have passed since then, and Crompton Place is just as lovely as it was when we first saw it on the day of the lawn party.  Three children are there now; two girls, Dora and Lucy, and a sturdy boy, who was christened James Harris Crompton, but is called Harry.  The doll-house has been brought to light, with Mandy Ann and Judy, to the great delight of the little girls, and Amy is never brighter than when playing with the children, and telling them of the palms and oranges, alligators and negroes in Florida, which she speaks of as home.

Eloise is very happy, and if a fear of the Harris taint ever creeps into her mind, it is dissipated at once in the perfect sunshine which crowns her life.  Nearly every year Jakey comes to visit “chile Dory an’ her lil ones,” and once Mandy Ann spent a summer in Crompton as cook in place of Cindy, who was taking a vacation.  But Northern ways of regularity and promptness did not suit her.

“’Clar for’t,” she said, “I jess can’t git use’t to de Yankee Doodle quickstep nohow.  At Miss Perkinses dey wasn’t partic’lar ef things was half an hour behime.”

Her mind dwelt a good deal on what she had seen at Miss Perkins’s, more than forty years before, and on her children and Ted, and when Cindy returned in the autumn she went back to him and the twins, laden with gifts from Amy and Eloise, the latter of whom saw that her mother gave more judiciously than she would otherwise have done.  Both Amy and Eloise are fond of driving, and nearly every day the carriage goes out, but the coachman is no longer Sam.  He is married and lives in the village, and his place is filled by Tom Walker, who wears a brown livery, and fills the position with a dignity one would scarcely expect in the tall, lank boy, once the bully in school and the blackguard of the town.