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It was now two weeks since they had returned from Quantuck, and the year was at the fall of the leaf. The Savins was covered with a thick carpet of golden brown, and the birches and hickories were blazing with gold, while the corner house was set in a nest of crimson and yellow and scarlet maples.

Then she hunted up a dry spot in her pillow, and dreamed of The Savins, and Mac, and Quantuck, and waked up, and went to sleep again, and dreamed of hearing her father saying in the next room, "Poor Babe! I don't think she was ever meant to be a good doctor; but I don't see what on earth she really is good for, anyway."

The noises of the city were hushed in the distance, and before her the broad reaches of the park stretched out and out under their mighty forest trees. In a way, the rolling slopes, the broad lawns and the trees reminded her of The Savins.

Across the lawn she could see The Savins among the tall, bare trees, and she paused now and then to watch the yellow sunshine as it sifted down through the branches. All at once she stopped, with a frown. "But I must see her," Allyn was saying sharply. "She is busy." "Never mind; she will see me." There was a word or two more; then a silence, and Theodora returned to her interrupted sentence.

"If he ignores it, I'll try it again in some other form. I only wanted to make sure that you approved of my meddling." She put her hand through Theodora's arm and together they paced up and down the broad piazza. Above them, the stars were dotting the still, dark air, and the ragged outline of The Savins showed itself faintly through the great trees.

Only savins and mulleins, with their dark pyramids or white spires of velvet leaves, diversified the sandy wayside; but out at sea was a wide sweep of blue, reaching far to the open ocean, which lay rolling, tossing, and breaking into white caps of foam in the bright sunshine.

Well, I swan I thought I should have split, I could hardly keep from bustin right out with larfter he was all covered with feathers, lint and dust, the savins of all the sweepins since the house was built, shoved under there for tidiness. He actilly sneezed for the matter of ten minutes he seemed half choked with the flaff and stuff, that came out with him like a cloud.

Directly after their return to The Savins, the doctor had sent a package of Allyn's drawings to one of his old-time classmates, now the head of a famous school of technology. The answer which came back to him was prompt and full of enthusiasm, and Dr. McAlister, as he read it, felt his last regret leaving him that his son was to abandon his own profession.

Theodora demanded, for Allyn had always been her own especial charge, and her marriage had made no break in their relations. Allyn's home was as much at the corner house as at The Savins. "No; only the world goes hard with him. He has needed you, Teddy. The rest of us rub him the wrong way. He has a queer streak in him. I wish I could get hold of him; but I can't."

It had been a very windy day. The bay was tossing in long gray-green lines of waves crested with flying foam. The black savins sighed and wailed as they bent to the cutting blast.