One closing scene we may glance at—a pretty room, with modern furniture, and wide, flower-clad windows looking upon one of the best of Tecum-seh’s residential streets. Annie, grown brighter-faced and yet no older in looks, despite the nearly four years of married life which have gone by, stands at the window with a baby in her arms, and laughs as she tosses the infant forward toward the panes, in greeting to the paternal parent, who is coming up the front steps. The wife is in gay spirits, not only because the head of the house has come home to dinner instead of stopping at the Club, but for another reason, compared with which all dinners were trivial.
“O Seth, her first tooth has come through!”
“That so? It’s about time, I should-think.”
His reception of the great tidings is so calm, not to say indifferent, that the beaming wife looks at him in mock surprise. Seth has not aged specially either, but he wears this evening an unwontedly serious expression of face, and gets into his dressing-gown and slippers with an almost moody air.
Baby is brought up in frowning, blinking proximity to her sire and made by proxy to demand an explanation of this untoward gloom, on an occasion which ought to be given over to rejoicing.
“Oh, I’m tired,” Seth answers; “and then—then I have a letter which puzzles and annoys me a little.”
“Is it anything that I know about?” Annie has seated herself beside him now, and looks sweet inquiry.
“Well, yes. It is a letter from Dent—you know I’ve let him go down to Washington to get an idea of the place and the men while the session is on—and along with a letter to the paper, pretty good stuff, too, he sends me this personal note. Read it for yourself.”
Annie took the letter, and reads steadily along through its neat chirography: