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He seemed to be looking in at Dolly, who, with her back to him, was at work over the stove. The next instant he was gone. It was eight o'clock. Jarvis Saunders alighted from the train at Ridgeville, finding his horse hitched to a rack according to the instructions he had left with his overseer. Mounting, he started homeward in a brisk canter through the clear moonlight.
As Mostyn's train ascended the grade leading up to the hamlet of Ridgeville, within a mile of which lay the little farm to which he was going, he sat at an open window and viewed the scene with delight, drawing into his lungs with a sense of restful content the crisp, rarefied air.
"Why should they have sent them to me?" he cried. There was no Endeavour society in Ridgeville, and he did not understand its methods. "The flower committee sends 'em to all the sick people in the congregation," explained Jimmy. "Posies and piety always sorter go together, seems like. Pretty, ain't they? But they ain't half so pretty as the young ladies that brought 'em."
So the poison of suspicion began its work. In a few days, the answer came to the clerk's letter. Alec Stoker was O. K. so far as the postmaster of Ridgeville knew. His grandfather had been one of the most highly respected citizens of the place, but then followed an account of Alec's father. This the self-appointed young detective seized eagerly. "Humph!
Over at Hilton's warehouse in Ridgeville t'other day I heard some cotton-buyers talkin' about men that had riz fast an' the underhanded tricks sech chaps use to hoodwink simple folks, an' they said Dick Mostyn capped the stack. Accordin' to them, he " "I don't believe a word of it!" Dolly stood up and angrily grasped the bell-handle. "It's not true. It's a meddlesome lie. They are jealous.
I must find out if Archie is dead, and what has become of the girl." After she had had her tea. Miss Betsey ordered her old white horse and old-fashioned buggy to be brought round, and started for a drive, taking the Ridgeville road and passing the house of the Brownes, where the family were assembled upon the wide piazza, enjoying the evening breeze.
She was going to Ridgeville in a day or two, but Daisy's mourning must first be bought, and in the excitement of shopping, and trying on dresses and bonnets, and deciding which shape was the most becoming, Daisy came near forgetting "poor, dear, dead Archie," of whom she talked so pathetically when she spoke of him at all.
"She'd show 'em what was what," she thought. "She'd Let 'em know that she had traveled and had been invited out among the gentry," for such she believed Daisy to be, and she anticipated with a great deal of complacency the sensation which that airy, graceful, woman would create in Ridgeville, the little place a mile or more from Allington, where her husband's farm was situated, and where stood the once old-fashioned house, but now very pretentious residence, which she called the Ridge House.
"My dear fellow, philosophy is primarily a matter of food; secondarily, a matter of clothes: it does not concern the head at all." At Butler we tightened the clutches, as the roads were becoming heavier. At Edgerton the skies were clearing, the roads were so much better that the last three miles into Ridgeville were made in ten minutes.
"I'm afraid I don't," Wilks answered, dryly. "It would be hard to imagine." "Well, I'll tell you," Dolly said to the audience. "They will do away with all that foolishness I've been talking about. That day at Ridgeville a dozen carriages were hired at a big expense to bring voters to the polls. Hundreds of dollars were spent on whisky, doctors' bills, lawyers' fees, and fines at court.
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