Van Tassel smiled as a coach and six rattled by him, the notes of its "mellow horn" breaking in impertinently upon the strains of an orchestra at the adjacent fashionable hotel. "Can this be quiet little Hyde Park?" he asked himself.
How the long June evenings of his boyhood came back to him as he sauntered down the changed street! How the thrushes used to sing here at this hour! How the boys and girls who could muster anything to navigate, from a scow to a trim canoe or sailboat, used to launch their craft, early in these long evenings, and sometimes lashing the boats together, a dozen in a row, would drift over the rocking waves and sing by the hour beneath a moon which electricity had not yet forced out of a long-established business!
The wild shore was changed, cultivated, and trimmed into order according to fashion now, like the young people who once disported over it in free country fashion.
Jack could not whistle the scrap from "Carmen" against the insistent rhythm of "After the Ball" which was being performed by a uniformed functionary from the hotel who passed him under the old familiar elms.
But Clover was on the piazza to meet him, a gracious genius of home in her blue gown, with the welcoming light in her eyes.
"I told you not to stay for me," said Jack, coming up the steps, his hat in his hand.
"I know," returned Clover, looking down into his happy, handsome face. "I stayed for my own sake as well as yours. I have been at the Fair all day, and did not feel like going down this evening. Mildred went from town with the Ogdens on their drag to take supper in Old Vienna. She wished me to give you an extra shake of the hand for her."
"Thank you, Clover," he answered, and he held her hand a moment as they interchanged a look that had in it reminiscence, but reminiscence from which all bitterness was gone. The sweet summer air seemed throbbing with their love for him with whom every part of this home was connected.
Miss Berry appeared at the house door. She started at the pretty tableau she saw, and the pure white Christmas when she pleaded for this woman with a heart-sore man passed like a vision across the fair June scene.
She would have withdrawn, but Van Tassel saw her. "How do you do, Aunt Love?" he said, and then she came forward to return his cordial greeting.