The Warders bought a home very near to the Burnham place, and so far as social life was concerned the two families speedily became as one.
Mrs. Burnham, singularly enough, as she reflected afterward, had not once, during the early days of their friendship, coupled the names of Alice and Erskine in her thoughts, congenial as they were. Although they were almost to a day of the same age, Alice, who had been for several years the nominal head of her father's house, appeared much the older, and more like a mature young woman than a girl still in the charge of a governess. It might have been this apparent disparity in their ages that helped Mrs. Burnham to take the girl to her heart and think of her as the daughter she had often wished for; not by any means as Erskine's wife, but as his sister.
Erskine had been from the first of their acquaintance drawn to the young woman in the frank and brotherly way that his mother desired. When the plans for college were matured, one of the loudly spoken regrets on the part of both mother and son was that they must be separated from the Warders.
It came to pass, however, in the course of their second year of absence that Mr. Warder had occasion to make the college town his headquarters for several months; so Alice and her former governess were installed in one of the hotels for the winter, that her father might have as much of her company as possible; and the Burnhams rejoiced greatly thereat.
Yet here was Erskine, barely six weeks afterwards, considering it not necessary to invite Alice to dinner! The poor mother sighed over the perversity and the blindness of young manhood, and knew for the first time that if Erskine had developed the peculiar interest which Miss Parker seemed to have awakened, for Alice Warder, instead, she could have rejoiced with her whole heart.
They came to dinner, Alice and her Boston cousin, a Harvard student of marked ability, and Miss Parker and her brother. And Alice was fully as marked a contrast to the other young woman as Ruth had believed that she would be. First, in the matter of dress. Alice Warder was an artist in dress. She wore at this quiet little dinner party a cloth gown of olive-green, so severely plain in its make-up that its richness of texture and faultless workmanship were apparent. And Miss Parker appeared in an elbow-sleeved white dress badly laundered and profusely trimmed with a quantity of lace that was startling rather than fine. Moreover, she was adorned with a mass of hothouse blooms to which she referred so significantly that the little company were at once made aware that Erskine was the giver.