“Your mother’s out, as usual, I suppose,” said Mr. Tramlay to his oldest daughter, as he came home in the afternoon and roamed despondently about the house, after the manner of family men in general when their wives are away.

“She isn’t back from her ride yet,” said Lucia. “You know the usual drive always keeps her out until about six.”

“I ought to know it by this time, I suppose,” said the merchant, “and I don’t begrudge her a moment of it, but somehow the house is never quite the same when she is out of it.”

Lucia looked at her father with a little wonder in her face. Then she laughed, not very cheerfully, and said,—

“Father, do you know that you’re dreadfully old-fashioned?”

“I suppose so. Maybe it’s force of habit.”

Lucia still wondered. She loved her mother, in the instinctive, not over-intelligent way of most young people, but really she could not see what there was about the estimable woman that should make her father long to see her every day of the year and search the house for her whenever he returned. She had never heard her father make romantic speeches, such as nice married people sometimes do in novels; and as for her mother, what did she ever talk of to her liege lord but family bills, the servants, the children’s faults, and her own ailments? Could it be, she asked herself, that this matter-of-fact couple said anything when alone that was unlike what the whole family heard from them daily at the table and in the sitting-room?

“Why are you looking at me so queerly?” suddenly asked the father. Lucia recovered herself, and said,—

“I was only wondering whether you never got tired of looking for mother as soon as you came home.”

“Certainly not,” said the merchant.

“Most husbands do, sooner or later,” said Lucia.

“Perhaps I will, some day,” the father replied; “and I can tell you when it will be.”

“Tell,” said Lucia.

“I think ’twill be about the day after eternity ends,” was the reply. “Not a day sooner. But what do you know about what some husbands do, you little simpleton? And what put the subject into your little head?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Lucia, dropping upon the piano-stool and making some chords and discords. “It came into my mind; that’s all.”

“Well, I hope that some day you’ll find out to your own satisfaction. By the way, I wish you’d get out of that morning gown. My new clerk is coming to dinner.”

“Oh, dear! then I’ll have dinner sent up to my room, I think. I don’t feel a bit well, and it’s awful to think of sitting bolt upright in a tight dress for an hour or two.” And Lucia whirled from side to side on the piano-stool, and looked forlorn and cross.

“I suppose it would be impossible to dine in a dress that is not tight?” said the father.

“Papa, please don’t tease me: I don’t feel a bit well; really I don’t.”

“What is the matter, child?” asked the father, tenderly. “Too much candy?—too few parties?”

“Oh, nothing, that I know of,” said the girl, wearily. “I’ll feel better when real cold weather comes, I suppose.” She played with the piano-keys a moment or two, and continued,—

“So you have a new clerk? I hope he’s nice?—not a mere figuring-machine?”

“Quite a fine fellow,” said the merchant. “At least, he seems to be.”

“Is he—have you given him the place you intended to offer Philip Hayn?”

“Yes.”

“The iron business is real good for a young man to get into, isn’t it?”

“Indeed it is, since iron has looked up.”

“And that stupid fellow might have had the chance if he hadn’t gone off home again without even calling to say good-by?”

“Just so.”

“Oh, I don’t want to see him,” said Lucia, pettishly. “I’m tired of young men.”

“What a mercy it is that they don’t know it!” said her father. “They’d all go off and commit suicide, and then merchants couldn’t have any clerks at all.”

“Now, papa!” said Lucia, with a crash on the lower octaves of keys, followed by a querulous run, with her thumb, over the shorter strings. “Is the new clerk anybody in particular? What is his name?”

“Philip Hayn.”

Lucia sprang from the piano-stool and almost strangled her father with her slender arms.

“Gracious, Lu!” exclaimed the merchant. “Your mother’s family must have descended from a grizzly bear. But why this excitement?”

“Because you’re a dear, thoughtful old man, who’s always trying to do good,” said Lucia. “If ’tweren’t for you that poor young man might never have a chance in the world. I think it’s real missionary work to help deserving people who aren’t able to help themselves; I know it is; for our minister has said so from the pulpit again and again.”

“I’m real glad to learn that my daughter remembers some of the things she hears in church,” said the merchant. “So you think young Hayn deserves a chance in the world, eh?”

“I only know what you yourself have said about him,” said Lucia, demurely.

“Good girl! always take your father’s advice about young men, and you’ll not be mistaken in human nature. Which cut of the roast chicken shall I send up to your room?”

“Oh, I’ll try to come down, as it’s only Phil: maybe I can coax Margie to help me dress.”

Lucia slipped slowly from the room, but went up the stairs like a whirlwind. The merchant sat down at the piano and made as dreadful a succession of noises as the much afflicted instrument had ever endured. He had to do something.

A quarter of an hour later Lucia floated down-stairs in a robe of pale blue, her face as fresh and bright as dawn.

“Sunrise at sunset!” exclaimed her father. “Well, girls are possessed to upset the natural order of things, I suppose. But, my dear daughter, you’ve put the rouge on too thick; don’t you think so?”

“Father!” exclaimed the girl, and the flush of her cheeks spread to her brow.

“Edgar,” said Mrs. Tramlay, who came in a moment or two after, “see how foolish you were to think Lucia ill. I never saw her looking better.”

“Yes,” said the merchant, dryly; “I told her the doctor was coming. That’s often enough to cure the ailments of some children, you know.” Then the merchant devoted ten minutes of business tact to the task of explaining to his wife the reasons of Philip’s return to New York; he also enlarged upon the Haynton Bay Improvement Company, and the probability that if the Tramlays were to build the first and handsomest house on the new property Mrs. Tramlay would naturally be the fashionable leader of whatever section or sub-section of society might select the place as a summer home. Mrs. Tramlay was inclined to be conservative on the subject, but when she learned that Marge was a stockholder and director in the company she became quite cheerful.

Phil was not so happy as he should have been while on his way to the Tramlays’. He wondered how he should be able to greet Lucia without betraying the mixed emotions which he was sure the first sight of her face would cause him. He had a firm conviction that he would feel awkward and act accordingly, and his remembrance of various men whom he had seen behaving awkwardly in the presence of young ladies made him certain that Lucia and Margie would laugh at him when his back was turned. He did not realize that in meeting, as well as in fighting, the burden of action does not all rest upon one person. Neither did he take into consideration the tact which some maidens acquire in a year or two spent in society. As he was ushered into the parlor, with a face which he was sure was sober and set, Lucia approached him with a pleasant smile, and exclaimed, as heartily and unaffectedly as if she were a Haynton girl,—

“How do you do, Phil? I’m ever so glad to see you back again.”

Away went all sense of soberness, hesitation, and doubt; the young man’s soul leaped to his face, and he held so long the little hand offered him that Lucia, perhaps remembering some impulsive demonstrations toward that graceful member, withdrew it before any attempt to release it had begun. Then the girl began a rapid series of questions about Hayn Farm and its occupants, and Phil made cheery replies, and Tramlay, after gazing at the couple from the back parlor, retired to his library to indulge undisturbed in as much vigorous and affirmative head-shaking as the situation seemed to justify.

“How do you think you will like the iron business, Mr. Hayn?” asked Mrs. Tramlay at dinner.

“Greatly, so far as I know it,” Phil replied. “Up to date my duties have been to go to lunch, read the morning papers, and chat with a railroad company’s vice-president about off-shore fishing.”

“We always try to break in our young men pleasantly,” said Tramlay, “so they’ll be willing to promise long service for small money: then we begin to put on heavier chains, one by one.”

“Papa’s clerks have a hard time, if they happen to be nice,” said Lucia. “They have to get postage-stamps for Margie and me when we happen in at the office, and find small change for us when we lose our pocket-books, and take us out to lunch when we come down town and don’t find papa in, and sometimes they have to come to trains for us when we’ve been a few miles out of town on a visit and the team doesn’t get in before dark.”

“Then I shall earnestly strive to be nice,” said Phil.

“There’s some down-town place,” said Margie, “where papa gets lovely candy a great deal cheaper than up Broadway; but he forgets it half the time, so we sometimes have one of the clerks order it sent to papa’s desk,—that is, clerks who know how to select candy,” said Margie.

“My education in that respect,” said Phil, “has not been as thorough as if I could have foreseen such necessity for it; but I will resume my studies at once.”

“Are you a good judge of tea?” asked Lucia. “Mamma has not been quite herself since one of papa’s clerks went to Pennsylvania to take charge of a rolling-mill. The good man used to spend hours in the tea-importers’ warehouses, down near the office, searching for the kind of tea that mamma dotes on.”

“You children are not to worry Phil with any of your trifling affairs,” said the head of the house. “I want you all to understand that, besides having a desk in my office, he is a large operator in real estate,—a capitalist,—a sort of monopolist, in fact, for he is secretary and a director of the Haynton Bay Improvement Company, which monopolizes one of the finest bits of shore front on the Atlantic Coast.”

“Haynton Bay!” said Lucia, in wonder. “Why, that is where Hayn Farm is.”

“Wise child!” said her father; “and that fine bluff portion of the farm that overlooks the bay is the company’s property. You’ll never again cut your shoes to pieces on the oat stubble on that bluff, for when next you see the place it will be covered by fine villas, the handsomest of which you probably will some day see mentioned in the newspapers as the country-seat of the well-known merchant prince, Edgar Tramlay, Esq., father of the charming——”

“Edgar! Edgar!” said Mrs. Tramlay.

“And, as I was saying,” continued Tramlay, “no purchaser’s title will be good without the signature and official seal of Mr. Philip Hayn. Candy and postage-stamps, indeed! Why, such a man’s time ought to be valued at about a dollar a minute.”

Then Phil was rich, Lucia said to herself. She did not much care, and she knew even less, about business-details; a fortune on paper was as good as any other kind, so far as she knew; but what she did very distinctly understand was that no one, not even her mother, would again have occasion to speak of Phil as a poor man, or even a countryman. Some young men who were accounted great catches were only secretaries and even assistant secretaries of one thing or other; she knew it, because she had seen their names in dividend notices and other advertisements in newspapers. How would the change in his fortunes affect her mother, she wondered. Mrs. Tramlay certainly was more affable to the young man than she ever had been before, and after dinner she even took Phil’s arm in returning to the parlor: the act signified nothing to Phil, but it set Lucia’s little heart dancing gayly. When Phil departed, soon after dinner, to accompany his father, by request, to a meeting of the “Society for the Amelioration of the Spiritual Condition of Savage Tribes,” Lucia lost very little time in signalling Margie with her eyes and going up to her room. A moment later Margie bounced in, closed the door, and exclaimed,—

“Lucia Tramlay! I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes. The idea of mamma, with the blood of a dozen High Dutch and Mayflower families in her veins, taking the arm of a countryman!”

“When there was no call for her to take any one’s arm,” added Lucia, “the affair being only an every-day family dinner.”

“‘Twas simply paralyzing,” said Margie; “but ’twas a sign that everything will be all right from this time forward. Dear me! I can imagine just how your new visiting-cards will look: ‘Mrs. Philip Hayn.’”

“Margie, Margie,” said Lucia, in a quick whisper, “do be quiet. I don’t even know whether he really loves me.”

“That’s because you didn’t sit at table where you could see his face all the while, as I did. Besides, a stone image would fall in love with you to-night: you never looked so perfectly entrancing in all your life.”

So, between all she had seen and heard, Lucia’s head was crowded with pleasant dreams long before it pressed its pillow.