CHAPTER V


At this precise moment Justin Peabody was eating his own beans and brown
bread (articles of diet of which his Detroit landlady was lamentably
ignorant) at the new tavern, not far from the meeting-house.

It would not be fair to him to say that Mrs. Burbank's letter had brought
him back to Edgewood, but it had certainly accelerated his steps.

For the first six years after Justin Peabody left home, he had drifted
about from place to place, saving every possible dollar of his uncertain
earnings in the conscious hope that he could go back to New England and
ask Nancy Wentworth to marry him. The West was prosperous and
progressive, but how he yearned, in idle moments, for the grimmer and
more sterile soil that had given him birth!

Then came what seemed to him a brilliant chance for a lucky turn of his
savings, and he invested them in an enterprise which, wonderfully as it
promised, failed within six months and left him penniless. At that
moment he definitely gave up all hope, and for the next few years he put
Nancy as far as possible out of his mind, in the full belief that he was
acting an honourable part in refusing to drag her into his tangled and
fruitless way of life. If she ever did care for him,--and he could not
be sure, she was always so shy,--she must have outgrown the feeling long
since, and be living happily, or at least contentedly, in her own way. He