The dining-room looked particularly pleasant this July evening. A gentle breeze stirred the curtains at the open windows, and the setting sun peeped through the vines outside and glistened on the old family plate. Three generations of Spencers looked down from the walls on the two men and the woman sitting at the great mahogany table. The two men and the woman, however, were not looking at the sunlight, the vines, or the swaying curtains; they were looking at each other, and their eyes were troubled and questioning.
"You say she is coming next week?" asked the younger man, glancing at the letter in the other's hand.
"But, Frank, this is so--sudden," remonstrated the young fellow, laughing a little as he uttered the trite phrase. "How does it happen that I've heard so little of this young lady who is to be so unceremoniously dropped into our midst next Tuesday?"
Frank Spencer made an impatient gesture that showed how great was his perturbation.
"Come, come, Ned, don't be foolish," he protested. "You know very well that your brother's stepdaughter has been my ward for a dozen years."
"Yes, but that is all I know," rejoined the young man, quietly. "I have never seen her, and scarcely ever heard of her, and yet you expect me to take as a matter of course this strange young woman who is none of our kith nor kin, and yet who is to be one of us from henceforth forevermore!"
"The boy is right," interposed the low voice of the woman across the table. "Ned doesn't know anything about her. He was a mere child himself when it all happened, and he's been away from home most of the time since. For that matter, we don't know much about her ourselves."
"We certainly don't," sighed Frank Spencer; then he raised his head and squared his shoulders. "See here, good people, this will never do in the world," he asserted with sudden authority. "I have offered the hospitality of this house to a homeless, orphan girl, and she has accepted it. There is nothing for us to do now but to try to make her happy. After all, we needn't worry--it may turn out that she will make us happy."
"But what is she? How does she look?" catechized Ned.
"You don't know! But, surely you have seen her!"
"Yes, oh, yes, I have seen her, once or twice, but Margaret Kendall is not a girl whom to see is to know; besides, the circumstances were such that--well, I might as well tell the story from the beginning, particularly as you know so little of it yourself."