with the homesickness always lurking at his heart he went about with her
to the amusements which she frequented, as she said, to help Ellen take
her mind off herself. At the play and the opera he sat thinking of the
silent, lonely house at Tuakingum, dark among its leafless maples, and
the life that was no more in it than if they had all died out of it; and
he could not keep down a certain resentment, senseless and cruel, as if
the poor girl were somehow to blame for their exile. When he betrayed
this feeling to his wife, as he sometimes must, she scolded him for it,
and then offered, if he really thought anything like that, to go back to
Tuskingum at once; and it ended in his having to own himself wrong, and
humbly promise that he never would let the child dream how he felt,
unless he really wished to kill her. He was obliged to carry his
self-punishment so far as to take Lottie very sharply to task when she
broke out in hot rebellion, and declared that it was all Ellen's fault;
she was not afraid of killing her sister; and though she did not say it
to her, she said it of her, that anybody else could have got rid of that
fellow without turning the whole family out of house and home.

Lottie, in fact, was not having a bit good time in New York, which she
did not find equal in any way to Tuskingum for fun. She hated the dull
propriety of the hotel, where nobody got acquainted, and every one was as
afraid as death of every one else; and in her desolation she was thrown
back upon the society of her brother Boyne. They became friends in their
common dislike of New York; and pending some chance of bringing each
other under condemnation they lamented their banishment from Tuskingum
together. But even Boyne contrived to make the heavy time pass more
lightly than she in the lessons he had with a tutor, and the studies of
the city which he carried on. When the skating was not good in Central
Park he spent most of his afternoons and evenings at the vaudeville
theatres. None of the dime museums escaped his research, and he