With the Procession | Page 5

the twilight, but if its expression
corresponded with the inflection of her voice, her nostrils were inflated
and her lips were curled in disparagement. To Jane, in her dark corner
of the carriage, this was patent enough. Indeed, it was sufficiently
obvious to all that Jane's years availed little to save her from the
searching criticism of her younger sister, and that Miss Rosamund
Marshall bestowed but slight esteem--or, at least, but slight
approval--upon Mr. Theodore Brower.

"Supposing he does tell me!" called Jane, absurdly allowing herself to
be put on the defensive. "It's a mighty good thing, I take it. If there's
anybody else in the family but me who knows or cares anything about
poor pa's business, I should like to be told who it is!"
"That will do, Jane," sounded her mother's voice in cold correction.
"There's no need for you to talk so. Your father has run his own
business now for thirty-five years, with every year better than the year
before, and I imagine he knows how to look out for himself. Thank
goodness, we are on a respectable pavement once more."
Mabel, turning a sudden corner, had given them a quick transition from
the rattle and jar of granite to the gentle palpitation that is possible on
well-packed macadam. The carriage passed in review a series of
towering and glittering hotels, told off a score or more of residences of
the elder day, and presently drew up before the gate of an antiquated
homestead in the neighborhood of the Panoramas.
"Just the same old place," murmured Truesdale, as he writhed out of his
cramped quarters and stood on the carriage-block in the dusk to stretch
his legs. "Wonderful how we contrive to stand stock-still in the midst
of all this stir and change!"

II
It was at Vevey, one morning late in August, that Truesdale Marshall
received the letter which turned his face homeward--the summons
which made it seem obligatory for him to report at headquarters, as he
phrased it, without too great a delay. He was pacing along the terrace
which bounded the pension garden lakeward, and his eye wandered
back and forth between the superscription of the envelope and the
distant mountain-shore of Savoy, as it appeared through the tantalizing
line of clipped acacias which bordered the roadway that ran below him.
"'Richard T. Marshall, Esq.,'" he read, slowly, with his eye on the
accumulation of post-marks and renewed addresses. "They keep it up

right along, don't they? I can't make them feel that initials on an
envelope are not the best form. I can't bring them to see that 'Esq.' on
foreign letters is worse than a superfluity." He referred once more to
the mountains of Savoy; they seemed to offer no loophole of escape.
"Well, I've got to do it, I suppose."
He made some brief calculations, and found that he could put himself
in marching order within a month or so. There was the trunk stored at
Geneva; there was that roomful of furniture at Freiburg--Freiburg-im-
Breisgau; there was that brace of paintings boxed up in Florence; and
there were the frayed and loosely flying ends of many miscellaneous
friendships.
"I should think the end of October might do for them," he droned,
reflectively. "They can't mean to cut me off any shorter than that."
He saw the steamer taking on passengers between the two rotund
chestnut-trees that adorned the end of the stubby little stone pier.
Voices of shrieking gladness came across from the coffee-tables on the
terrace of the Three Crowns, his nearest neighbor to the right.
"Well, America is meeting me half way," he said; "I don't want to seem
reluctant myself. Suppose we make it Southampton, about October
15th?"
Truesdale Marshall had been away from home and friends for about the
length of time ordinarily required by a course through college, but it
was not at college that most of this period had been passed. He had left
Yale at the end of his sophomore year, and had taken passage, not for
Chicago, but for Liverpool, compromising thus his full claims on
nurture from an alma mater for the more alluring prospect of culture
and adventure on the Continent. This supplementary course of
self-improvement and self-entertainment had now continued for three
years.
He had written back to his family at discreet intervals, his
communications not being altogether untinctured, it is true, by
considerations of a financial nature; and his sister Jane, who charged

herself with the preservation of this correspondence, would have
undertaken to reconstruct his route and to make a full report of his
movements up to date on ten minutes' notice. She kept his letters in a
large box-file that she had teased from her father at the store; and two
or three times a