Glendenning and I went back to the rectory, and sat down in his study,
or rather he made me draw a chair to the open door, and sat down himself
on a step below the threshold. The day was one of autumnal warmth; the
haze of Indian summer blued the still air, and the wind that now and
then stirred the stiff panoply of the trees was lullingly soft. This
part of Gormanville quite overlooked the busier district about the
mills, where the water-power found its way, and it was something of a
climb even from the business street of the old hill village, which the
rival prosperity of the industrial settlement in the valley had thrown
into an aristocratic aloofness. From the upper windows of the rectory
one could have seen only the red and yellow of the maples, but from the
study door we caught glimpses past their boles of the outlying country,
as it showed between the white mansions across the way. One of these, as
I have already mentioned, was the Conwell place; and after we had talked
of the landscape awhile, Glendenning said: "By the way! Why don't you
buy the Conwell place? You liked it so much, and you were all so well in
Gormanville. The Conwells want to sell it, and it would be just the
thing for you, five or six months of the year."

I explained, almost compassionately, the impossibility of a poor
insurance man thinking of a summer residence like the Conwell place, and
I combated as well as I could the optimistic reasons of my friend in its
favor. I was not very severe with him, for I saw that his optimism was
not so much from his wish to have me live in Gormanville as from the new
hope that filled him. It was by a perfectly natural, if not very logical
transition that we were presently talking of this greater interest
again, and Glendenning was going over all the plans that it included. I
encouraged him to believe, as he desired, that a sea-voyage would be the
thing for Mrs. Bentley, and that it would be his duty to take her to
Europe as soon as he was in authority to do so. They should always, he