spoken a word of love to her. He had intervened in her behalf with his
cousin, and had convinced Miss Hatchard of her merits as a librarian;
but that was a simple act of justice, since it was by his own fault that
those merits had been questioned. He had asked her to drive him about
the country when he hired lawyer Royall's buggy to go on his sketching
expeditions; but that too was natural enough, since he was unfamiliar
with the region. Lastly, when his cousin was called to Springfield, he
had begged Mr. Royall to receive him as a boarder; but where else in
North Dormer could he have boarded? Not with Carrick Fry, whose wife was
paralysed, and whose large family crowded his table to over-flowing; not
with the Targatts, who lived a mile up the road, nor with poor old Mrs.
Hawes, who, since her eldest daughter had deserted her, barely had the
strength to cook her own meals while Ally picked up her living as a
seamstress. Mr. Royall's was the only house where the young man
could have been offered a decent hospitality. There had been nothing,
therefore, in the outward course of events to raise in Charity's breast
the hopes with which it trembled. But beneath the visible incidents
resulting from Lucius Harney's arrival there ran an undercurrent as
mysterious and potent as the influence that makes the forest break into
leaf before the ice is off the pools.

The business on which Harney had come was authentic; Charity had seen
the letter from a New York publisher commissioning him to make a study
of the eighteenth century houses in the less familiar districts of New
England. But incomprehensible as the whole affair was to her, and hard
as she found it to understand why he paused enchanted before certain
neglected and paintless houses, while others, refurbished and "improved"
by the local builder, did not arrest a glance, she could not but suspect
that Eagle County was less rich in architecture than he averred, and
that the duration of his stay (which he had fixed at a month) was not