to make out just what Mr. Breckon’s religion is, and what his relations to his charge in New York may be.  These do not seem to them quite pastoral, and he himself shares their uncertainty.  But since his flock does not include Mrs. Rasmith and her daughter, he is content to let the question remain in abeyance.  The Rasmiths are settled in Rome with an apparent permanency which they have not known elsewhere for a long time, and they have both joined in the friendliest kind of letter on his marriage to their former pastor, if that was what Breckon was.  They have professed to know from the first that he was in love with Ellen, and that he is in love with her now is the strong present belief of his flock, if they are a flock, and if they may be said to have anything so positive as a belief in regard to anything.

Judge Kenton has given the Elroys the other corner of the lot, and has supplied them the means of building on it.  Mary and Lottie run diagonally into the home-house every day, and nothing keeps either from coming into authority over the old people except the fear of each other in which they stand.  The Kentons no longer make any summer journeys, but in the winter they take Boyne and go to see Ellen in New York.  They do not stay so long as Mrs. Kenton would like.  As soon as they have fairly seen the Breckons, and have settled comfortably down in their pleasant house on West Seventy-fourth Street, she detects him in a secret habit of sighing, which she recognizes as the worst symptom of homesickness, and then she confides to Ellen that she supposes Mr. Kenton will make her go home with him before long.  Ellen knows it is useless to interfere.  She even encourages her father’s longings, so far as indulging his clandestine visits to the seedsman’s, and she goes with him to pick up second-hand books about Ohio in the War at the dealers’, who remember the judge very flatteringly.

As February draws on towards March it becomes impossible to detain Kenton.  His wife and son return with him to Tuskingum, where Lottie has seen to the kindling of a good fire in the furnace against their arrival, and has nearly come to blows with Mary about provisioning them for the first dinner.  Then Mrs. Kenton owns, with a comfort which she will not let her husband see, that there is no place like home, and they take up their life in the place where they have been so happy and so unhappy.  He reads to her a good deal at night, and they play a game of checkers usually before they go to bed; she still cheats without scruple, for, as she justly says, he knows very well that she cannot bear to be beaten.