Bressant

Sophie went flitting up the garden-path toward the house, and in a

moment more the sisters were in one another's arms. Bressant, glad of

the concealment afforded by the shrubbery, remained gazing moodily at

the fountain, his head on his hand. The two girls entered the house, and

sat down in the professor's study, where the old gentleman (who had been

the first to meet Cornelia) sat enclouding himself with smoke, but

betraying no other symptom of his huge delight.

"But how came you to get here so soon, you dear darling?" said Sophie,

looking with lighted eyes at her sister. "We thought it would be a week

at least."

"Oh, bless your heart, I couldn't wait, you know. So awfully tired I got

of seeing new things and people. Dear me!"--and Cornelia threw herself

back in her chair and uplifted her gloved hands in a little gesture of

ineffability--"you would never imagine what a bore society is, after

all."

The professor, from his cloud, cast, unobserved, a glance of quiet

scrutiny at his daughter. A certain jaunty embroidery of tone and manner

struck him at once--she wasn't quite the same simple little woman who

had gone to New York two months ago. Well, well, they would wear off,

perhaps, these little affectations; and then, too, it was not to be

expected of her that she'd be a girl all her life. They all must needs

pass through this stage to something better--or worse: all women of pith

and passion like Cornelia.

"How did you leave Aunt Margaret?" inquired he.

"Oh, désolée, because I would go away," replied Cornelia, with a very

pretty laugh. "She vowed she could have spared me much better six weeks

earlier; for, you see, after I'd learned the ropes, and how to take care

of myself, I became, as she expressed it, 'such a dear, sweet,

invaluable little attachée.'"

Sophie laughed at the comical air with which her sister repeated the

sentence; yet, when her laugh was gone, there remained a slight shadow

of disappointment. She, too, was unwillingly aware of some alteration.

"Is she such a grand lady as you expected?" asked she.

"Oh, my dear, grandeur's a humbug, let me tell you. Gracious! by the

time I'd been there a week, I could put it on as well as anybody. Aunt

Margaret, she was no end of a swell, and all that; but, as for

grandeur!--And she was such an odd old thing. Sometimes I seemed to like

her, and sometimes she almost made me faint. Once in a while I thought

she was trying to pump me about something; though, to be sure, there was

nothing in me to be pumped. I told her about Abbie, for one thing, as

much as I knew, and she seemed awfully interested--it was put on, I

suppose, very likely; and yet she really did seem to mean it. I remember

she couldn't get over my forgetting Abbie's last name: she even told me

to mention it the first time I wrote to her. So queer of the old

person."