I was excited and in high spirits; altogether, it was a very happy day.
It was more than a week after this, that the invitation came which turned the world upside down at once, and made me most extravagantly happy.

It was from Mrs.Hollenbeck, and I was asked to spend part of June and all of July and August, with them at R----.
At R---- was their old family home, a place of very little pretension, but to which they were much attached.

When the father died, five years before, the two sons had bought the place, or rather had taken it as their share, turning over the more productive property to their sister.
They had been very reluctant to close the house, and it was decided that Sophie should go there every summer, and take her servants from the city; the expenses of the place being borne by the two young men.

They were very well able to do it, as both were successful in business, and keeping open the old home, with no diminution of the hospitality of their father's time, was perhaps the greatest pleasure that they had.
It was an arrangement which suited Sophie admirably.

It gave her the opportunity to entertain pleasantly and informally; it was a capital summer-home for her two boys; it was in the centre of an agreeable neighborhood; and above all, it gave her yearly-exhausted purse time to recuperate and swell again before the winter's drain.