"Arthur Winslow, I give you five minutes."

"But to know every day and hour that I'm watched."

"I am waiting busily for her slayer."

"Arthur! Arthur! can't you speak?"





I

RUTH AND GODFREY


The old street, keeping its New England Sabbath afternoon so decently
under its majestic elms, was as goodly an example of its sort as the
late seventies of the century just gone could show. It lay along a
north-and-south ridge, between a number of aged and unsmiling cottages,
fronting on cinder sidewalks, and alternating irregularly with about as
many larger homesteads that sat back in their well-shaded gardens with
kindlier dignity and not so grim a self-assertion. Behind, on the west,
these gardens dropped swiftly out of sight to a hidden brook, from the
farther shore of which rose the great wooded hill whose shelter from the
bitter northwest had invited the old Puritan founders to choose the spot
for their farming village of one street, with a Byington and a Winslow
for their first town officers. In front, eastward, the land declined