She kissed her hand to it and ran downstairs, for it was time to go.  The train was drawing up at the station, a short distance from her grandmother’s door, and in a few minutes she was speeding away towards Crompton.  At nearly the same hour Jack Harcourt was starting from New York for his promised visit to Crompton.  His letter has given some insight into his character, but a look at his face will give a better.  It was not a very handsome face, but it was one which every man, and woman, and child would trust, and never be deceived.  For a young man of twenty-six he had seen a good deal of life, both at home and abroad, but the bad side had made but little impression upon him.

“It slips from Jack like water from a duck’s back, while we poor wretches get smirched all over,” Howard Crompton was wont to say of him, when smarting from some temptation to which he had yielded, and which Jack had resisted.

They had been friends since they were boys of eighteen in Europe, and Howard had nursed him through a fever contracted in Rome.  They had also been chums in Harvard, where both had pulled through rather creditably, and where Jack had acted as a restraint upon Howard, who was fonder of larks than of study.

“Are you sure he is the right kind of friend for you?” Jack’s sister—­who was many years his senior, and who stood to him in the place of a mother—­sometimes said to him; and he always answered, “He isn’t a bad sort, as fellows go.  Too lazy, perhaps, for a chap who has nothing but expectations from a crabbed, half-cracked old uncle, and not always quite on the square.  But he is jolly good company, and I like him.”

Something of this sort he said to his sister, who was in her New York home on the day when he was starting for Crompton, and had expressed her doubts of Howard’s perfect rectitude in everything.

“He isn’t a saint,” he said to her, “but I don’t forget how he stuck to me in that beastly place on the Riviera, while every soul of the party but him hurried off, afraid of the fever.  He is having a grand time at Crompton, and I’m going to help him a while, and then buckle down to hard work in the office.  So good-by, and don’t worry.”

He kissed her and hurried off to the station, bought the “Century,” put several expensive cigars in the pocket of his overcoat, took a chair in a parlor car, and felt, as the train sped away out of the city, that it was good to live, and that Crompton held some new pleasure and excitement for him, who found sunshine everywhere.

Moving in the same direction and for the same point was another train, in which Eloise sat, dusty and tired, and homesick for the old grandmother and the house under the big poplar tree.  Added to this was a harrowing anxiety for news from California.

“If I do not hear by Christmas, I shall certainly take an extra week in my vacation, and go there,” she thought; and then she began to wonder about Crompton, and District No. 5, and if she would have any trouble with the big boys and girls, and how she would like Mrs. Biggs, who had boarded the school teachers for twenty years, and was to board her; and if by any chance she would ever see the inside of the Crompton House, of which she had heard from a friend who had visited in the town and had given glowing descriptions of it.