WE were sitting at dinner Monday night, all of us wondering why Ellery Sibthorp had not come. We had heard the whistle of the train on which he was to have come, and we had allowed more than time for the livery team to come up, but it was now seven, and we had given him up.

“I’m afraid he missed the train in New York. I wish I’d walked down to the station.”

“Will you please tell me,” said Ethel, “how your going down to Egerton would have prevented his missing the train in New York?”

“Well, I was thinking that perhaps he missed the hackman at Egerton.”

“It’s too perfectly awful of him,” said Cherry, “seeing that I stayed over just to meet him.”

“The disappointment will be his when he sees you,” said I, and at this both of them asked me what was the matter with my wits.

“Have you had an infusion of Irish blood?” asked Ethel.

“I’m thinking of how inhospitable I was not to go down to the train.”

There was a knock at the kitchen door, and Minerva, who had been removing the soup plates, went out to open it.

A light-keyed, pleasant voice said to her,

“Can you tell me where the Vernons live?”

“Right here, sir. Come in won’t yer?”

In through the kitchen came a light step, following Minerva’s heavy one, and as she opened the door into the dining room she said to us informally,

“I guess this is the man you was lookin’ for.”

“Oh, I didn’t know you had company,” said Sibthorp, setting down his grip and removing, or trying to remove his hat. His hand hit it and it fell to the floor, and when he stooped to pick it up he felt flustered, and put it on again, his face turning the colour of a peony.

Ethel rose from her seat and said,

“Mr. Sibthorp, you surely haven’t walked up? May I present you to Miss Paxton?”

“Certainly,” said the poor fellow. “That is, I did, and I’m happy to meet everybody.”

He had taken off his hat again, and I now found his hand and gave it a hearty shake.

“This is your house for the time being, Ellery, old man,” said I, “and Miss Paxton is one of the family, also. We call her Cherry, but it isn’t obligatory. Now hang your hat up in the hall, and I’ll show you where you can find a pitcher and basin, and nobody’s the least bit stiff in this house, so you can feel as happy as if you were by yourself.”

I led him out of the room, and by the time he had explained how he had not seen any hack, and had come up by a short-cut that a farmer told him about, he was feeling more in command of himself. It is really a tax on a man’s self possession to be shown through the kitchen and brought face to face with a strange and exceedingly pretty young woman, and I would not care to have anyone think that Sibthorp was one of those hopelessly diffident fellows, whose every contact with their fellow beings is agony.

When he came back to the table he went over and shook hands with Ethel, and sat down in his seat quite himself.

He was a good-looking fellow, reminding one a little of the pictures of Robert Schumann. His eyes were deep-set and his lips full, and if he had been born twenty years earlier his hair would have been long. The spirit of the times is against excessive hair.

The cow boy had it and stuck to it and—the cow boy is going. Whether artists and literary men pondered on the fate of the cow boy, and in order to save themselves, cut their hair, or not, I am not prepared to say, but it is a fact that if all the hair that is not in these United States were to be placed end to end it would encircle the earth time and time again—which beautiful thought I dedicate to the statisticians.

“What bracing air you have up here,” said Sibthorp. “Why, I came up the hills like a streak, and I was getting so that a short walk in the city tired me. Isn’t it a great place?”

“You’re inoculated soon,” said Cherry. “There’s something in the spirit of this place that makes people stay on and on. I was only invited for a week, and now they can’t get me to go. It’ll be the same with you.”

“Ellery,” said I, “the motto of this place is going to be ‘All hope (of getting away) abandon ye who enter here.’ You see, Ethel and I were getting mortally tired of our honeymoon, which had lasted four years, and so we began to invite people up here to relieve our ennui.”

“Aren’t you ashamed of yourself, to say that?” said Cherry; but Ethel only laughed.

“It’s a fact. At first Minerva (she’s the lady that ushered you in) contributed daily to our amusement and excitement, but now she’s getting to be semi-occasional, and so we’re thinking of our friends who don’t hate the country, and you may be in quite a congested community before you have a chance to go. You play tennis, don’t you?”

“I used to when I was a boy.”

“Oh, don’t say that. We’re all boys and girls up here. We expect to set up a court to-morrow and there’ll be four of us to play.”

“Have you written much lately?” asked Ethel.

It was curious to see the extra animation that came into Sibthorp’s face at her question. Tennis had left him cold, but the mention of the works of Sibthorp roused him.

It is the fashion to laugh at this tendency in writers, but I have a dim suspicion that the engineer is roused to greater interest at mention of some engineering problem he has solved, than he is at the ordinary topics of the day, and so it is with all.

“Had something accepted last week,” said he. “It had been everywhere, and if it had come back again, I would have burned it up, but the Atlantic took it, and the only reason I didn’t send there at first was because I thought it wasn’t good enough.”

“How proud we must be.”

“Well, it’s funny, but as soon as the Atlantic took it, I went and got my carbon copy and read it, and I thought it was pretty good, and when it had come back time before, I had read it, and thought it was rotten.”

“And when it’s printed, there’ll be as many opinions of it as it has readers. But you’re progressing if the Atlantic takes you up. Doesn’t it make you feel sorry to see the goal?”

“No, sir. Now I won’t be happy until I’ve written a serial for the Atlantic, or some one of the big magazines.”

“Is that the way it works?” laughed Cherry. “The more one gets, the more one wants?”

“That’s the way ambition is built up,” said I, “acceptance by acceptance.”

“What a place to work in this must be,” said Sibthorp, as he allowed Ethel to replenish his plate.

Cherry laughed. “Yes, you ought to see the way Mr. Vernon works. A poem in the morning, a short story in the afternoon, and an essay in the evening.”

Sibthorp turned his glowing eyes on me. “Good boy. Are you really working?”

“Miss Paxton sees fit to jest,” said I. “I’m afraid I haven’t done as much as I might.”

“You couldn’t do less, Philip, seeing you haven’t done a thing since you came up,” said Ethel.

“All the better for winter. But don’t let my example influence you, Sibthorp. I’ll turn you loose with pens and paper, or my typewriter, and you can enrich the literature of this country every minute, if you want to. Only, if you take my advice, you’ll give literachure the go by, and stay out doors for a week or so.”

“I’ll work out doors, but I must work,” said he, his eyes shining.

Ethel laughed. “A night up here will cure that. You’ll be content to loll by to-morrow.”

“Why, I wrote on the way up,” said he.

“Really!” said Cherry. “Wh............