There was a scent of spring in the air. “In the spring a young man’s fancy lightly turns to--” love, the poet says; and so, perhaps, does a girl’s. But before either is warmly awakened to that interest, spring touches them thrilling with a profusion of thought and planning and anticipation, not so distinct as love. The young creatures feel the sap of life mounting within them. Oft-times they know nothing more, and have formed no definite idea either of what they want, or why; but their minds are running over with the flood of living. Their plans go lightly skimming through the air, now poising on a branch, and again flashing widely on devious wings to all the points of the compass like so many birds. There was no immediate change necessary in the placid course of their school-girl existence; but they leaped forward to meet the future with all the force of their energies. Yet, perhaps, it was only one of them who did this. Lucy was too calm in the certainty of the changes that sooner or later would happen to her--changes already mapped out and arranged for her, as she was well aware--to be able to give herself up to these indefinite pleasures of imagination. But Katie leaped at her future with the fervor of a fresh imagination. She made up her mind to sacrifice herself, and give Lucy her cousin in less time than many would take to decide whether they should give up a ribbon. She sunk into silence for a little time while she was pondering it, but never from any indecision; only because, in her rapid foresight of all that was necessary, she did not quite see how the first step, the introduction of these two to each other, was to be brought about.
Just then the girls became aware of two other figures, bearing down upon them from the other side of the common--two larger personages making their slight youth look what it was, something not much more than childish. There was Mrs. Stone and the unknown gentleman who had arrived at the White House, to the scandal of the old governess, last night. When the girls perceived this they mutually gave each other’s arms a warning pressure. “Oh, look, here he is!” said Katie, and, “Is that the gentleman?” Lucy said. The encounter brought to the former a quick flush of excitement. She wondered a little, on her own account, who the gentleman was; for an apparition of such an unusual description in a girl’s school had naturally excited all the inmates. A man under Mrs. Stone’s roof! Men were common enough, things at home, and aroused no feelings of curiosity or alarm. But here it was quite different. Whence came he, and what had he come for? But besides this, there was another source of interest in Katie’s thoughts. As she conceived her own plot, a glimmering sense of the other came upon her by instinct. Why had this wonderful occurrence, this arrival of a gentleman, happened at Mrs. Stone’s? Mrs. Stone knew all about Lucy’s fortune, and the wicked scheme invented by her father (of which Katie knew nothing except by lively guesses) to keep her unmarried. And straightway the gentleman had come! She watched him anxiously as he approached. He was like Mrs. Stone, and he was not unlike the smiling and gracious face in a hairdresser’s window, complacent in wax-work satisfaction. He was large, tall, with fine black hair, whiskers and mustache, and a good complexion. He had something of that air of self-display--not vanity or conceit, but simply expansion and spreading out of himself which is characteristic of large men used to the company of many women. Katie pressed her friend’s arm more and more closely as they approached.