He fully expected that she would show embarrassment—he was inwardly excited himself—but she answered him calmly, while Lou looked on in wonder:
"I've been looking at you for hours, Evan—on the platform; you are quite famous now, you know. Everyone waits to get a peep at you."
There was a potent rebuke in her words. Evan felt it keenly. He made an excuse to get back to his father.
Hometon was out with the town band to meet the Nelson party. Some of the bankclerks had driven to the depot in hacks to meet him they called their "New G. M."
The excitement did not appeal to Evan, but he readily forgave dear old Hometon this one excess. There was a concert arranged in the town-hall for the evening, which, of course, had to have a chairman.
Just before the concert began old Grandpa Newman nudged John, the grocer, sitting beside him, and whispered huskily:
"It do beat all, John, the way people carry on nowadays. Now, in my day—"
Luckily for the grocer, the band began to badly play a march. The chairman grinned in his seat—in fancy he was transported to Albany Avenue, Brooklyn, and listened again to the saloon bands of that benighted street.
The day after the village dissipation Evan loitered around home playing catch with Henty and Lou. He found they liked to have the ball tossed midway between them, and did his best to be accommodating.
"Well, A. P.," he said, when Lou had given up the game to help get lunch, "what do you think of Miss Arling?"