the burial; and he himself had been curious enough to pay Kent a visit to
spy out the reason why. On their first evening together in the stuffy
little law office which had been his father's, Kent had made a clean
breast of it: there was a young woman in the case, and a promise passed
before Kent had gone to college. She was a farmer's daughter, with no
notion for a change of environment; wherefore she had determined Kent's
career and the scene of it, laying its lines in the narrow field of her
own choosing.

Later, as Loring knew, the sentimental anchor had dragged until it was
hopelessly off holding-ground. The young woman had laid the blame at the
door of the university, had given Kent a bad half-year of fault-finding
and recrimination, and had finally made an end of the matter by bestowing
her dowry of hillside acres on the son of a neighboring farmer.

Thereafter Kent had stagnated quietly, living with simple rigor the life
he had marked out for himself; thankful at heart, Loring had suspected,
for the timely intervention of the farmer's son, but holding himself well
in hand against a repetition of the sentimental offense. All this until
the opening of the summer hotel at the foot of Old Croydon, and the coming
of Elinor Brentwood.

No one knew just how much Miss Brentwood had to do with the long-delayed
awakening of David Kent; but in Loring's forecastings she enjoyed the full
benefit of the doubt. From tramping the hills alone, or whipping the
streams for brook trout, David had taken to spending his afternoons with
lover-like regularity at the Croydon Inn; and at the end of the season had
electrified the sleepy home town by declaring his intention to go West and
grow up with the country.