"I am glad it did. Shall we walk down Main Street? Are you staying at Hope Terrace?"
"I shall be for a few days."
A silence fell between them. There was no one else in the street; and their steps sounded with a steady tramp, as if they might walk on to some definite end.
"Jack, dear old friend, after requiting your tender love to my exacting and selfish boyhood with a pitiless treachery that will always shame my manhood, I wonder if I dare ask it back, if I dare come to you."
"There is nothing to give back. I do believe I have kept up a sort of girlish hankering for you. And now, if I can do any thing, if you are in any perplexity"—
"Come up to Hope Terrace, and take tea with me. I want to talk to you all the evening. You have just the same mesmeric strength that used to soothe me when a boy. What a milk-and-water cub I must have been! I wonder you did not throw me over."
Jack laughed.
"Let us turn back to Kit Connelly's, and I can send a message home, so that mother will not keep tea waiting."
That done, they strolled on together the same path by which Fred had come. The sun had dropped down behind the hill, and the glowing tints had faded to purple-black and indistinct grays. They wound around the hills, and came up to the very gate where their last good-by had been uttered. And Fred remembered then that this was the first time Jack had shared the hospitality of Hope Terrace, now when it was no longer his.
Mrs. Milroy gave them some supper in a pretty little apartment which had been the servants' parlor, and was now hers. Then they went up to Fred's room, which had been opened and aired. Some of its choicest belongings had been taken away, but another than Fred would not have remarked this. And here they renewed the remembrances of the years that had fallen between.