"Then it was the very same little boy!" Charlotte said.

"Who was the very same little boy?" her mother demanded.

"The one that was there to-day; the young man, I mean," Charlotte explained, and then she told what had happened with a want of fullness which her mother's imagination supplied.

"Did he say who he was? Is he coming back to-morrow or this afternoon? Did you inquire who he was or where?"

[Pg 23] "What an idea, mother!" Charlotte said, grouping the several impossibilities under one head in her answer.

[Pg 23]

"You had a perfect right to know, if you thought he was the one."

"But I didn't think he was the one, and I don't know that he is now; and if he was, what could I do about it?"

"That is true," Mrs. Forsyth owned. "But it's very disappointing. I've always felt as if they ought to know it was your undecidedness and not ungenerousness."

Charlotte laughed a little forlornly, but she only said, "Really, mother!"

Mrs. Forsyth was still looking at the curtains. "Well, these are not the scrims I wanted. You must go back. I believe I will go with you. The sooner we have it over the better," she added, and she left the undecided Charlotte to decide whether she meant the scrim curtains or the young man's identity.

It was very well, for one reason, that she decided to go with Charlotte that afternoon. The New-Yorkers must have completed the inspection of their trunks, for they had not come back. Their failure to do so was the more important because the young man had come back and was actively superintending the unpacking of his room. The [Pg 24] palatial furniture had all been ranged up and down the corridor, and as fast as a trunk was got out and unlocked he went through it with the help of the storage-men, listed its contents in a note-book with a number, and then transferred the number and a synopsis of the record to a tag and fastened it to the trunk, which he had put back into the room.

[Pg 24]

When the Forsyths arrived with the mistaken scrim curtains, he interrupted himself with apologies for possibly being in their 

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