However, I started back in an intently serious frame of mind to find my couch. I lost my way, and stumbling against a swinging-door which opened into a comparatively spacious apartment, what was my joy to discover my trunk, with the portmanteau containing my keys on top of it.
I then proceeded to array myself with an absorbing ardor and devotion, doing my hair before a hand-glass with rare resignation of spirit. I began to feel more and more like an incorporated existence, and admitted a sudden eagerness to join the Keeler family at breakfast.
I had no hesitation which direction to take, being guided by the sound of voices and wafts of penetrating odors.
It was a fortunate direction, for I discovered on the way my lost apparel artfully concealed under a small melodeon, and, strangely enough, I was again brought face to face with my deserted couch and the weeping lady on the wall. She held me a moment with the old fascination. As I put up my glasses, I thought I detected in her face a hitherto unnoticed buoyancy of expression and not having wholly escaped in my life from ideas of a worldly nature, I reflected that, probably, her regretted consort had left her with a sufficient number of thousands.
In this same connection, I was reminded that I, myself, had started out on an independent career, and wondered if it would be unkind or undutiful in me to start a private bank account of my own. I concluded that it would not.
When I entered the little room where the Keeler family was assembled:—
"Why, here's our teacher!" exclaimed Grandma Keeler in accents of delight, and came to meet me with outstretched arms. "We couldn't abear to wake ye up, dearie," she went on, "knowin' ye was so tired this mornin'; and there's plenty o' time—plenty o' time. My Casindana come home!" she murmured, with a smile and a tremble of the lips, and a far-away look, for the instant, in her gentle eyes.
In fact, the whole Keeler family received me with outstretched arms. If I had been a long-lost child, or a friend known and loved in days gone by, I could not have been more cordially and enthusiastically welcomed.
The best chair was set for me; glances of eager and inquiring interest were bent upon me.
I accepted it all coolly, though not without a certain air of affability, too, for I had a natural desire to make myself agreeable to people, when it wasn't too much trouble; but I was quite firm, at this time, in the conviction that there was little or no faith to be put in human nature. On the whole I was much entertained and interested.