"We stay at Cozzen's Hotel, Leila. I will send on
the baggage and we will walk up to the Point."
She hardly heard him. A tall young man in white pantaloons and blue
jacket stood on the pier. "Good gracious, Uncle Jim, it is John!" A
strange sense of disappointed remembrance possessed her. The boy playmate
of her youth was gone. He gave both hands of welcome, as he said, "By
George, Leila, I am glad to see you."
"You may thank uncle for our visit. Aunt Ann was not very willing to part
with me."
He was about to make the obvious reply of the man, but refrained. They
talked lightly of the place, of her journey, and at last he said very
quietly, even coldly, as if it were merely a natural history observation,
"You are amazingly grown, Cousin Leila. It is as well for cadets and
officers that your stay is to be brief."
"John, I have been in Baltimore. You will have to put it stronger than
that--I am used to it."
"I will see if I can improve on it, Leila."
Now this was not at all the way she meant to meet him, nor these the
words they meant to use--or rather, she--for John Penhallow had given it
no thought, except to be glad as a child promised a gift and then
embarrassed into a word of simple descriptive admiration. When John
Penhallow said, with a curious gravity and a little of his old formal
manner, "I will reflect on it," she knew with the quick perception of her
sex that here was a new masculine study for the great naturalist woman.
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