From the evening of the conversazione, Marcus aroused to a livelier sense of his pretty cousin Selina, and she gained a new conception of him. How had she failed to realize that it was not so much that he was singular as significant? She said as much to her mother and Auntie.

"He's Juanita's son," said Mamma guardedly. "If she is my sister, I have to allow that she's at times both eccentric and trying."

"He's Juanita's son but his own keeper," avowed Auntie. "If he's ever thought in his life for anybody but himself, I've yet to hear of it."

But Selina felt that she as well as they were mistaken. Within the next few weeks Marcus took her to the theater several times, and Oh, the wonder not only of seeing Booth's Hamlet and Modjeska's Rosalind through the medium of his kindness and his comment and elucidation, but of seeing how many persons in the audience strove to catch her cousin's eye and invite his recognition! He did editorial paragraphs which were clever for the leading daily paper, of course, but there was more to it than that! Apparently if one can successfully back up some chosen eccentricity, as of an old hat and shabby cape and the rest of it, by exactly the adequate manner, he attains to being a personage! And Selina for the better part of her seventeen years, had been thinking Marcus merely had bad manners!

"You must do a bit of reading of a little different nature, pretty cousin mine," he told her about this same time. "Aunt Lavinia and good Miss Ann Eliza keep you a child."

And accordingly he brought her books of a flattering nature, among them "The Story of Creation," differing from the narrative in the Pentateuch in a way which would have startled Mamma and Auntie unspeakably. But which she and Maud, adventurous soul that this person always was, set themselves to read faithfully.

And lastly, about February, Marcus came round with a letter from Miss Boswell who with her aunt was spending the remainder of the winter in the South. Evidently the intimacy between Marcus and Miss Pocahontas was close.

He read Selina one especial bit, which, or so it seemed to her who had seen nothing at all of the world, opened a wide-spreading and dismaying vista!

More and more [thus went the letter] I am convinced we ought to do some of our wandering early. Our sense of true values ought to come to us young. These glorious Florida nights of tropical softness and moonlight only gain through their recall of other scenes as lovely met in my wanderings when I was young with my invalid father and my mother in search of the health he was not to find. I don't suppose we ever really deplore the gain through experience, whatever the cost at the time. My love to the little sequestered way-side bloom, Selina. How sweet she was in her sheltered innocence and how touching. Do not forget how we discussed the chances for her, you and I, for a bit more of the world through you, her big cousin?

So? That was it? Miss Boswell with her tender eyes of comprehension was behind this kindness from Marcus? Still one must be thankful even for dictated favors once they are accepted.

Marcus read her bits again from a second letter full of the soft glamour of tropical scene and beauty. After he had gone, Selina hunted her old school geography and sought the map. A pale yellow lady-finger a little over-run in the baking, Florida was on the page, but in the mind of Selina as she sat there in the shabby parlor with the book outspread on her lap, Florida the ever-blooming and the tropical, was Ponce de Leon in gleaming apparel with banner and sword stepping ashore upon sands flowing golden beneath the fancied fountain of his search, Ponce de Leon the ever glorious and understandable to youth, symbol of quest, of faith in the fabled, of adventuring forth!

Maud walked in here on Selina in the parlor in the dusk, the open book still on her lap, the fire died to red embers, Auntie's brasses in the faint glow the one note of brightness amid the gloom. Selina's smile was a bit wan as she looked up and fluttered the pages of the unwieldy folio. "Thirty-seven maps herein of the world and its blue and pink and yellow grand divisions and kingdoms and countries, Maudie! Marcus has just been here and he's left me wincing over what he calls my limitations. I've been to Cincinnati, once, for two days, to the exposition and the musical festival with you and Judy and your mother. And I've been to Chicago for a week with Auntie and Cousin Anna to visit some Wistar kin who live in a dreary house right on the street, one of a row. Though Cousin Anna says it's a very good house and being in a real city is expected to sit on the street in a row, that I merely don't know any better. And that's the extent of my traveling!"

"Limitations is a very good word," decided Maudie promptly. "I'm deploring our deficiencies right along! I've a new word myself. Mr. Welling and I are reading German together. I gave up waiting for the rest of you to keep your appointments and asked him. That's what I came over to tell you. We started last night."

These friends of Culpepper were their friends now. As Maud put it, since they discovered they were outgrowing Brent and Sam and the rest, these newer acquisitions were a godsend!

Mr. Welling, by Christian name Henry, square-set by mind as by body though a wag, had seemed to gravitate to mercurial Maud.

"Apparently to correct what he chooses to call my sweeping mis-assertions," was Maud's way of explaining it.

Mr. Cannon, Preston by name, and perpetual joker, gravitated to Adele for whom he had to diagram each joke, and assure her he didn't mean it, while Mr. Tate, that scholastic young man, with earnest admiration sought Amanthus who told him wonderingly she'd always supposed Pompey was a buried city till he told her he was a general.

Something of the personal histories of these young men were known now to the young ladies. The father of Mr. Welling was a judge in his end of the state. Mr. Cannon's people lived in one of the mountain counties and were what is called land-poor, and Mr. Tate had been raised by a grandmother.

"And shows it," Maud said when she heard this. Mr. Tate had money left him by his grandfather too, in a quiet respectable sense, and when his grandmother died he would have a very considerable more.

"And his name's Lemuel," again from Maud at the time they were learning these facts, "and it's perfectly patent after you know him, why the others continually bait him."

But right now Maud had come over to talk to Selina about her German and Mr. Welling.

"What's your new word, Maud?" Selina asked.

"Wanderlust. We came on it last night. It's apropos of what you were saying about the thirty-seven maps in the atlas."

"I see."

In April the Boswells returned from the South and Miss Pocahontas wrote asking Selina up to Eadston to visit her.

"It will mean a new spring dress," demurred Mamma, "and the price of the ticket besides."

"But it will mean three days for her with Marcia and Pocahontas Boswell," said Auntie. "She can go up from Friday to Monday and not miss her teaching either. I must say, Lavinia, they're the kind of people I want to have her visit."

"I suppose you're right. We'll have to manage the rest of it. Selina get your pen and thank Miss Pocahontas for her invitation, and say you accept with pleasure."

Miss Pocahontas herself was at the Eadston station on the following Friday afternoon to meet Selina. The carriage and horses and colored coachman in livery waiting for them outside were all old and handsome and well preserved. The town as they drove through it was old, too, but not so well preserved.

"As though our forefathers planned and builded for us better than we deserve," Miss Pocahontas said in speaking of this. She seemed to regret it and to make a point of it.

A covered wooden bridge across the river dividing the town seemed older than anything else. Indeed Miss Pocahontas herself and Selina, as the carriage rolled echoingly across this bridge, full of laughter and pretty exchange of confidences, alone seemed young of all the staid and sleepy place. For the square, brick house they came to presently, on a street of big, square houses, its yard running down to this same river, was old too, and its box hedges and its purple beeches were old with it.

And within the house the big rooms, both above and below stairs, were filled with old furniture, and mahogany at that, not sent to the junk-shop or the attic either, but cared for and revered and openly treasured. And as for other old things there were old portraits and old brasses and old andirons, and soft-footed, pleasant-voiced old colored servants, two at least among them in spectacles and with white hair.

There were old candle-sticks, old silver and old damask on the supper table later. The pale-gray dress of Miss Boswell the elder, who was tall and pleasing, trailed with a soft rustle, and the amber-toned dress of the younger Miss Boswell was cut low.

Selina's mother had strained a point and along with the new spring street dress, had made her a soft chaille, white sprinkled over with pink rosebuds. Selina here at the Boswell table with it on, could not be too thankful!

When the meal was about half over, Miss Marcia Boswell laughed softly:

"I saw your Cousin Maria Buxton last week, Selina. She was down here in Eadston for the day to pay her taxes and took her dinner with us. She reminded me that your aunt as a girl, once was here overnight with her to a dance. She also made me admit what I've supposed all these years was hidden in my maiden breast. Which is, that when she and I and your Aunt Ann Eliza Wistar were sixteen—Ann Eliza spent a good deal of her time up here with Maria in those days—we all three were in love with the desperation of love at sixteen, with John Buxton, the father of your Culpepper. He married at twenty according to his own bent and not ours. Maria of course got him later after they were both free again. Maria usually holds to her point pretty well, as I suggested to her when she twitted me the other day. And even with two daughters of her own by her first husband, if she has a downright weakness, and she admits it herself, it's for her stepson by John Buxton, your Culpepper."

"Why," said Selina, quickly, "if Auntie's really foolish about any one person in the world, it's Culpepper."

"Better and better," laughed Miss Marcia Boswell, altogether a delightful personage. "I'll be ready when next they come twitting me."

The next day Miss Pocahontas and Selina in a pretty phaeton, drove about the town with its old state buildings, and out the road along the cliffs overlooking the river.

"Tell me about the teaching," Miss 'Hontas asked. "How does it go? Are you satisfied that it's the right thing?"

Selina flushed, hesitated and opened her heart. "It's the only thing I can do as far as I can see, if it paid better. My little boys seem to be getting along pretty well. But it don't pay at all, especially when I have to ride in bad weather. I can't talk much about it at home, Mamma and Auntie don't understand, and take it out in disliking the mothers of my little boys. And I don't seem to know how to find anything better for next year."

She hesitated, her gaze up the canyon of the rushing river winding between its cliffs of limestone softened with April verdure. She had seen little of any scenery before! "You're so practical and so definite, Miss 'Hontas, you and Miss Boswell, too. Auntie thinks it's terrible to make personal remarks, and I beg your pardon, but I envy it so."

"I'm not practical, I'm afraid, my dear, as you'll find. Look at the town there below us, Selina, nestling in its hollow? I'm a bit overenthusiastic instead. But perhaps what you see in Aunt Marcia and myself is the result of depending on ourselves for a good many years. My father died alone with me in Rome when I was fifteen, and my mother had died shortly before. Aunt Marcia and I have our own means and look after them."

The next day, on Sunday afternoon, Miss Pocahontas had callers: Mr. Mason, a bluff young man who let it be understood his interests were horses and in a milder degree the new stables he was building on his stock-farm, and Mr. Huger who talked in a prosperous way of the tobacco market and the present dullness in business. One could not associate either of them in mind with Miss 'Hontas.

After these callers were gone, Miss 'Hontas went upstairs to her sitting-room to write a note to a Miss Diana Talbot. Why she mentioned this name, Selina did not quite see, but later on she was to understand.

She went up to this sitting-room, too, at Miss Pocahontas' suggestion, and finding a seat on the broad white window-sill, not far from the desk, looked out on the gravel paths and the box edgings and the beds of jonquils and tulips in the garden sloping down to the river.

Presently Miss Pocahontas laid down her pen and rather tenderly studied the slim figure in the rosebud chaille on the window-seat.

"And what now?" she asked with the smile in her eyes she seemed to keep there for Selina, as this person turned.

"Mr. Huger was speaking of Marcus, Miss 'Hontas, after he heard he was my cousin. He said what jolly good company men found him. I wouldn't have thought Marcus was such a good mixer? Miss 'Hontas, do you suppose another thing is true? From something Marcus said to me, I fancy he writes verse."

Miss Pocahontas laughed outright: "And you have not grasped yet, or will not, my little friend, that your cousin is a really and easily clever person—even to cultivating Mr. Huger, who is prominent and might be useful? Since you say he intimated it, why, yes, he writes verse, writes bits of it even to me. The Austin Dobson its prophet sort of thing my share is, light but clever and graceful, the ballade, the triolet, the rondeau. I even have tried my hand at it under his tutelage and encouragement myself," laughing.

Selina fingered a fold of her rosebud chaille and colored: "I don't believe I know Austin Dobson and I'm sure I don't know about the ballade, and the rest of what you mentioned."

When she heard more about these ballades and the rest and even was shown some attempts at them by Miss 'Hontas, smiling at herself as she did so, she was charmed. She had caught a new viewpoint, too! By play at these clever things of life, play which one puts a value on as play, life is made prettier! She and Maud and incidentally the others had gone at everything exaggeratedly and too in earnest! By taking self too seriously, you lay yourself open to ridicule! Ardent and dear Selina, she was sure she had it right now!

And so pleased was she, that when on her return home the next day the group gathered at her house in the evening to welcome her, she complained to them about the commonplaceness of the average intercourse and disclosed to them the more pleasing and different diversions of persons like Miss Pocahontas and Marcus.

The response, however, was not all that she could have hoped for.

"Since when this furore about Marcus?" inquired Culpepper, but then he always had refused ordinary grace to him, holding that he was a poseur.

"It was I always defending Marcus to you, up to now, Selina," said Maud with a show of truth.

"She complains of the commonplaceness of intercourse when you are here, Algy," said Mr. Cannon, "and when Tate, old man, is just through telling Miss Amanthus that no man can say wherein lies the significance of the fifth leg of the Assyrian bull."

"This poet person named Austin, and his masterpieces called Dobsons, make a note of 'em, Culpepper," directed Mr. Welling. "Some of us must try and qualify."

As the days went on, however, Marcus was not above being pleased by this new attitude from Selina. He met her downtown wearing her new spring hat, and the mail the next morning brought her a communication from him, penciled, off-hand as it were, on the back of an envelope, saying:

A broad-brimmed hat upon her head
To shade her cheeks' sweet roses,
A crown were fit, but she wore instead
A broad-brimmed hat upon her head.
I'll see her thus until I'm dead
And darkness on me closes,
A broad-brimmed hat upon her head,
To shade her cheeks' sweet roses.

Selina discovering more and more that Marcus was sought for, and according to his fancy, went everywhere, felt even gratefully what these lines meant coming from him.

Again, on the day later in May when her little class was to close for the summer, she wore her new white piquÉ that she felt became her, to mark the occasion. When the hour came for saying good-bye to William Jr. and his three companions, they accompanied her to the Williams' front gate, then because it was to be a protracted farewell until fall, went with her to the corner.

As she was taking leave of them here with final conscientious admonitions in her capacity of their teacher, Tommy Bacon's younger brother, Tod, came along and stopped to ask her something about the barge picnic up the river, on for Friday. It was here that Marcus, out in that neighborhood in the quest of a book he had loaned, so he explained, came upon the group, Selina looking very well indeed in that new piquÉ which became her, being kissed in succession by four little boys, and Tod waiting until this be done, to walk along home with her.

That same afternoon's mail brought her another communication from Marcus, carelessly penciled in blue this time, which said:

The young she loves,
The innocent doves,

And her heart is quite tender, I ween,

And little boys
Are ceaseless joys

Up from six all the way to sixteen.

How she preaches,
As she teaches

With a glow in every feature,

And they,
Lack-a-day,

Fall in love with their teacher!

There was no denying that it was pleasing, and Selina determined, if it was not lapsing too much into that overearnestness again, that she would put this and the preceding one from Marcus away with certain other treasures. There are kinds in straws to show the way the wind blew, that some day surely will be pleasing to bring forth and show, not alone to one's children but grandchildren. Maud did even more in this sort of prudential provisioning; she saved all illuminating and perhaps valuable data, lists of her reading, theater programs, dancing-cards with personal tributes in masculine writing upon them, so that if in time need should come for biographical matter concerning her, it would be there. And she frankly declared, too, that she had every enthusiastic and honorable intention that such material should be needed. But then one had learned not to pattern on Maud too closely!

At the close of Marcus' gratifying stanzas he had added a further line:

Had no idea until recently you were taking this thing of teaching and earning your way in earnest. Come down to my place at 3:30 to-day and see me.

By place, Marcus meant his office at the newspaper building. It was three o'clock when the postman left the note. When Mamma heard about it she demurred at first, saying it was no place for a young girl to be going, but when Selina pointed out that she had only to go up a stairway opening on the street to a door at its head, she gave way.

"Put on your spring suit and that jabot I made you to show at the throat of your jacket when you went up to Eadston," she directed, "and wear your best gloves and your good hat. No, the piquÉ won't do, Selina; a business office calls for wool street clothes."

"And let us hope he'll be there when you get there," said Auntie. "It's mighty little dependence I ever put on Marcus."