Fine fellow, I tell you, Felicia!" He receiving in reply some such answer as: "Yes, quite lovely in fairy tales, Peter, and when you have taught him--for you did it, remember--how to shovel and clean up underbrush and split rocks--and that just's what Ruth told me he was doing when she took a telegram to her father which had come to the house--and he in a pair of overalls, like any common workman--what, may I ask, will you have him doing next?
Is he to be an engineer or a clerk all his life?
He might have had a share in his uncle's business by this time if he had had any common-sense;" Peter retorting often with but a broad smile and that little gulp of satisfaction--something between a chuckle and a sigh--which always escaped him when some one of his proteges were living up to his pet theories.
And yet it was Miss Felicia herself who was the first to welcome the reprobate, even going to the front door and standing in the icy draught, with the snowflakes whirling about her pompadoured head, until Jack had alighted from the tail-end of Moggins's 'bus and, with his satchel in his hand, had cleared the sidewalk with a bound and stood beside her.
"Oh, I'm so glad to be here," Jack had begun, "and it was so good of you to want me," when a voice rang clear from the top of the stairs: "And where's daddy--isn't he coming ?" "Oh!--how do you do, Miss Ruth?
No; I am sorry to say he could not leave--that is, we could not persuade him to leave.

He sent you all manner of messages, and you, too, Miss--" "He isn't coming?
Oh, I am so disappointed! What is the matter, is he ill ?" She was half-way down the staircase now, her face showing how keen was her disappointment.
"No--nothing's the matter--only we are arranging for an important blast in a day or two, and he felt he couldn't be away.

I can only stay the night." Jack had his overcoat stripped from his broad shoulders now and the two had reached each other's hands.
Miss Felicia watched them narrowly out of her sharp, kindly eyes.

This love-affair--if it were a love-affair--had been going on for years now and she was still in the dark as to the outcome.

There was no question that the boy was head over heels in love with the girl--she could see that from the way the color mounted to his cheeks when Ruth's voice rang out, and the joy in his eyes when they looked into hers.