tiny tasks, each unvarying year by year and each set and determined by customs immemorial as the oldest memory; and Calvin took up the old tasks, which he had performed as a boy, with such whole satisfaction that his mother lent to a neighbor the old gardener who regularly worked about the place.
He rejoiced in the feel of the familiar rake and the mattock in his hand, at the tug and tire of unused muscles; but, as he bent, his mind wantonly returned to the court-room in Chicago; he sank his heel, with proprietary pleasure, into the soft soil which his spade had upturned, and he thought of the flat on the floor above Ketlar's. He heaped up leaves and set fire to them at dusk, and while he stood leaning upon his rake and gazing into the flames, the reverie, which he had tried to command on the train and cause to return to him, came of itself.
One morning he visited the attic, haunted by heirlooms of seven generations. He came upon survivors of his own leaden soldiers packed away in a box beside that holding a model of an 1812 frigate which Calvin carefully had played with when a boy; and there, with his toys in the box before him, he suddenly set to wondering about the Royle girl, when she was a child, what playthings she had had and where she had laid them.
He called upon Melicent and she asked him to walk with her to the tea-room which she recently had opened on the Post Road. She had no need to earn money but she believed that she ought to occupy herself, and she was receiving much local admiration for her spirit and enterprise.
"Surely, after being two years in the west, you must approve of a girl working," she said to Calvin.
"Of course I do," he agreed, and praised the perfect order of the place and the excellence of the food which
