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"Peter has no head-stone to mark his grave, but his memory is green in Hilltown.
The thought was a death-knell to Helen's last hope, and she sank down, quite overcome; she knew that Arthur could have had but one motive in acting as he had, that he meant to cut himself off entirely from all his old life and surroundings. He had no friends in Hilltown, and having lived all alone, it would be possible for him to do it. Helen remembered Mr.
The note, in Arthur's hand, but so unsteady as to be almost illegible, ran thus: "You will find in this my board for the past week; I am compelled to leave Hilltown, and I shall not ever return." And that was all. Helen stared at it and stared again, and then let it fall and gazed about her, echoing, in a hollow voice, "And I shall not ever return!"
"Yes!" exclaimed Helen. "Stop! Stop!" "But it's only half a mile or so farther," said Mr. Harrison, reining up his horses, "and I thought you'd like the change." "Yes," panted Helen, with more agitation than ever. "But I can't, we'd have to go through Hilltown!" The wondering look of course did not leave the other's face at that explanation. "You object to Hilltown?" he asked.
"Just think how romantic that would be!" the girl laughed; "and I could write your memoir and tell all I knew about you. Tell me about yourself, Arthur I don't mean for the memoir, but because I want to know the news." "There isn't any, Helen, except that I finished college last spring, as I wrote you, and I'm teaching school at Hilltown." "And you like it?"
"The minister received these offers with politeness, and promised to think of them; and then one day after a brief absence from home, set every body in the parish talking, by driving into town seated in an open wagon, shining with fresh paint and varnish, and drawn by a horse the like of which had never been seen in Hilltown before.
She saw far in the distance the houses of the place to which she was bound, and she said nothing more, her companion also becoming silent as he perceived her agitation. Helen had been constantly growing more anxious, so that now the carriage could not travel fast enough; it seemed to her that everything depended upon what she might find at Hilltown.
In answer to all questions, the parson said he had purchased the horse at Winterport, of a seafaring man, that he was eight years old, and his name was Peter. But to neither man nor woman in Hilltown did he ever tell the sum he paid in yellow gold and good bank-notes for the white horse,
He made nothing of walking five miles to a meeting on a December evening, with the thermometer below zero, or of climbing the hills in a driving snow-storm to visit a sick parishioner. He was a tall, spare man, healthy and vigorous, with iron-gray hair, a strong kind face, and a smile in his brown eyes that made every baby in Hilltown stretch out its arms to him to be taken.
They continued, however, for fully a mile, and the road remained narrow, so that there was danger of upsetting in the ditch if they tried to turn. "What do you wish me to do?" Mr. Harrison asked with a smile. "The more we go on the longer it will take us if we are to go back, and I may miss my train; is your prejudice against Hilltown so very strong, Miss Davis?"
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