These two had scarcely settled down when Randolph and Ashby Gordon appeared. Ran was a little older than Hartley, Ashby a little younger. The former already considered himself a man, and was just at the age when girls who wore their hair down their backs were regarded as mere children, therefore Ran was quite free and easy with them all, the more especially as he and the Corners were cousins and he had met both Jo and Daniella. Ashby was a quiet boy, but as Nan once said of him, “his appreciation of what others said was worth more than some persons’ faculty for conversation.” Dr. Paul was the last to arrive, but went directly to Place o’ Pines with Marcus Wells who met him at the end of the stage route when the two took a short cut across country, the doctor sending his luggage by ’Lish in the wagon.
Both young men appeared that same evening. Nan was the first to see the lanterns bobbing along the path by the lake. “I do believe here they come,” she cried.
“What they?” asked her mother with a smile.
“Why, Dr. Paul and Mr. Wells. You know Mr. Wells went over to meet Dr. Paul this morning.”
“How did you learn so much?”
“’Lish told me that he had brought the doctor’s valise this far and that he had arrived on the stage. I suppose they have come down in the canoe, and will take the valise back with them. They are coming directly up from the lake.”
“Oh, I see, and I suppose you are very glad Dr. Paul has come.”
“Of course. Aren’t you? I thought you were so fond of him, mother.”
“I am, my dear, very fond of him.”
Nan looked a little puzzled; she did not quite fathom what was in her mother’s mind. Her own innocent pleasure was nothing she cared to hide. “I’m going to get the rest and we’ll all go meet them,” she said. “We’ll get up a triumphal procession,” and off she flew.