As they entered the room the heavy fur was yielded up with apparent reluctance, and revealed to the astonished girls a man of ordinary stature with a slight and elegant figure set off by a traveling suit of irreproachable cut.

His light reddish-yellow hair, mustache, and sunburned cheek, which seemed all of one color and outline, made it impossible to detect the gray of the one or the hollowness of the other, and gave no indication of his age.

Yet there was clearly no mistake.
Here was Gabriel Lane seizing their nervously cold fingers and presenting them to their "Uncle Sylvester." Far from attempting to kiss Kitty, the stranger for an instant seemed oblivious of the little hand she offered him in the half-preoccupied bow he gave her.

But Marie was not so easily passed over, and, with her audacious face challenging his, he abstractedly imparted to the shake of her hand something of the fervor that he should have shown his relative.
And, then, still warming his feet on the fender, he seemed to have forgotten them both.
"Accustomed as you have been, sir," said the Reverend Mr.Dexter, seizing upon an awkward silence, and accenting it laboriously, "perhaps I should say INURED as you have been to the exciting and stirring incidents of a lawless and adventurous community, you doubtless find in a pastoral, yet cultivated and refined, seclusion like Lakeville a degree of"-- "Oh, several degrees," said Uncle Sylvester, blandly flicking bits of buffalo hair from his well-fitting trousers; "it's colder, you know--much colder." "I was referring to a less material contrast," continued Mr.Dexter, with a resigned smile; "yet, as to the mere question of cold, I am told, sir, that in California there are certain severe regions of altitude--although the mean temperature"-- "I suppose out in California you fellows would say our temperature was a darned sight MEANER, eh ?" broke in Amos Gunn, with a confidential glance at the others, as if offering a humorous diversion suited to the Californian taste.

Uncle Sylvester did not, however, smile.