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When he came through the passage a few moments later, there was a sound of laughter in the parlor. He recognized the full, round lazy chuckle of Aunt Chloe, but there was a higher girlish ripple that he did not know. He had never heard Sophy laugh before. Nor, when he entered, had he ever seen her so animated. She was helping Chloe set the table, to that lady’s intense delight at “Missy’s” girlish housewifery. She was picking the berries fresh from the garden, buttering the Sally Lunn, making the tea, and arranging the details of the repast with apparently no trace of her former discontent and unhappiness in either face or manner. He dropped quietly into a chair by the window, and, with the homely scents of the garden mixing with the honest odors of Aunt Chloe’s cookery, watched her with an amusement that was as pleasant and grateful as it was strange and unprecedented.

“Now den,” said Aunt Chloe to her husband, as she put the finishing touch to the repast in a plate of doughnuts as exquisitely brown and shining as Jack’s eyes were at that moment, “Hannibal, you just come away, and let dem two white quality chillens have dey tea. Dey’s done starved, shuah.” And with an approving nod to Jack, she bundled her husband from the room.

The door closed; the young girl began to pour out the tea, but Jack remained in his seat by the window. It was a singular sensation which he did not care to disturb. It was no new thing for Mr. Hamlin to find himself at a tete-a-tete repast with the admiring and complaisant fair; there was a ‘cabinet particulier’ in a certain San Francisco restaurant which had listened to their various vanities and professions of undying faith; he might have recalled certain festal rendezvous with a widow whose piety and impeccable reputation made it a moral duty for her to come to him only in disguise; it was but a few days ago that he had been let privately into the palatial mansion of a high official for a midnight supper with a foolish wife. It was not strange, therefore, that he should be alone here, secretly, with a member of that indiscreet, loving sex. But that he should be sitting there in a cheap negro laundry with absolutely no sentiment of any kind towards the heavy-haired, freckle-faced country schoolgirl opposite him, from whom he sought and expected nothing, and ENJOYING it without scorn of himself or his companion, to use his own expression, “got him.” Presently he rose and sauntered to the table with shining eyes.

“Well, what do you think of Aunt Chloe’s shebang?” he asked smilingly.

“Oh, it’s so sweet and clean and homelike,” said the girl quickly. At any other time he would have winced at the last adjective. It struck him now as exactly the word.

“Would you like to live here, if you could?”

Her face brightened. She put the teapot down and gazed fixedly at Jack.

“Because you can. Look here. I spoke to Hannibal about it. You can have the two front rooms if you want to. One of ’em is big enough and light enough for a studio to do your work in. You tell that nigger what you want to put in ’em, and he’s got my orders to do it. I told him about your painting; said you were the daughter of an old friend, you know. Hold on, Sophy; d–n it all, I’ve got to do a little gilt-edged lying; but I let you out of the niece business this time. Yes, from this moment I’m no longer your uncle. I renounce the relationship. It’s hard,” continued the rascal, “after all these years and considering sister Mary’s feelings; but, as you seem to wish it, it must be done.”

Sophy’s steel-blue eyes softened. She slid her long brown hand across the table and grasped Jack’s. He returned the pressure quickly and fraternally, even to that half-shamed, half-hurried evasion of emotion peculiar to all brothers. This was also a new sensation; but he liked it.