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Nancy turned away quickly. “That’s one thing I wanted to come to Boston for; that’s what I want to tell you. She don’t really care anything about you. She only wanted to get you away from the other girls. I know for certain that she likes Joe Brown better than anybody, and now she’s been going with him almost all winter long. He keeps telling round that they’re going to be married in the spring; but I thought if they were, she’d ask me to get some of her best things while I was in Boston. I suppose she’s intendin’ to play with him a while longer,” said Nancy with honest scorn, “just because he loves her well enough to wait. But don’t you worry about her, Mr. Aldis!”

“I won’t indeed,” answered Tom meekly, but with an unexpected feeling of relief as if the unconscious danger had been a real one. Nancy was very serious.

“I’m going home the first of the week,” she said as they parted; but the small hand felt colder than usual, and did not return his warm grasp. The light in her eyes had all gone, but Tom’s beamed affectionately.

“I never thought of Addie Porter afterward, I’m afraid,” he confessed. “What awfully good fun we all had! I should like to go down to East Rodney again some time.”

“Oh, shan’t you ever come?” cried Nancy, with a thrill in her voice which Tom did not soon forget. He did not know that the young girl’s heart was waked, he was so busy with the affairs of his own affections; but true friendship does not grow on every bush, in Boston or East Rodney, and Nancy’s voice and farewell look touched something that lay very deep within his heart.

There is a little more to be told of this part of the story. Mrs. Annesley, Tom’s aunt, being a woman whose knowledge of human nature and power of sympathy made her a woman of the world rather than of any smaller circle,–Mrs. Annesley was delighted with Nancy’s unaffected pleasure and self-forgetful dignity of behavior at the dancing-school. She took her back to the fine house, and they had half an hour together there, and only parted because Nancy was to spend the night with cousin Snow, and another old friend of her mother’s was to be asked to tea. Mrs. Annesley asked her to come to see her again, whenever she was in Boston, and Nancy gratefully promised, but she never came. “I’m all through with Boston for this time,” she said, with an amused smile, at parting. “I’m what one of our neighbors calls ‘all flustered up,'” and she looked eagerly in her new friend’s kind eyes for sympathy. “Now that I’ve seen this beautiful house, and you and Mr. Aldis, and some pretty dancin’, I want to go right home where I belong.”

Tom Aldis meant to write to Nancy when his engagement came out, but he never did; and he meant to send a long letter to her and her mother two years later, when he and his wife were going abroad for a long time; but he had an inborn hatred of letter-writing, and let that occasion pass also, though when anything made him very sorry or very glad, he had a curious habit of thinking of these East Rodney friends. Before he went to Europe he used to send them magazines now and then, or a roll of illustrated papers; and one day, in a bookstore, he happened to see a fine French book with colored portraits of famous dancers, and sent it by express to Nancy with his best remembrances. But Tom was young and much occupied, the stream of time floated him away from the shore of Maine, not toward it, ten or fifteen years passed by, his brown hair began to grow gray, and he came back from Europe after a while to a new Boston life in which reminiscences of East Rodney seemed very remote indeed.