They had quarreled and made up with kisses, and later on had quarreled and made up without the kisses, but they had always felt themselves the most cordial and simple friends.

Then had come the time when Gifford must go to college, and Lois had only seen him in his short vacations; and these gradually became far from pleasant.

"Gifford has changed," she said petulantly.

"He is so polite to me," she complained to Helen; not that Gifford had ever been rude, but he had been brotherly.
He once asked her for a rose from a bunch she had fastened in her dress.
"Why don't you pick one yourself, Giff ?" she said simply; and afterwards, with a sparkle of indignant tears in her eyes and with a quick impatience which made her an amusing copy of her father, she said to Helen, "I suppose he meant to treat me as though I was some fine young lady.

Why can't he be just the old Giff ?" And when he came back from Europe, she declared he was still worse.
Yet even in their estrangement they united in devotion to Helen.