MORE NEWS THAT WAS NOT ENOUGH.

Little by little the excitement over Phil’s return abated, being merged in curiosity as to why his father was remaining in the city. Local curiosity was somewhat discouraged, too, by a few sharp retorts to persons who were impertinently inquisitive about the New York developments of Phil’s acquaintance with Lucia. There was no lack of stories, however, regarding the couple: in any part of the civilized world, no matter how stolid the inhabitants, there is imagination enough to replace the absent links in a desired chain of facts. All that Haynton and its vicinity really knew about the supposed Hayn-Tramlay affair was that the Tramlays had been at Hayn Farm, that they had a daughter named Lucia whose age did not differ much from Phil’s, that Phil had been in New York for more than a fortnight, that he had gone direct from Sol Mantring’s sloop to Tramlay’s office, that he had been seen in New York in store-clothes, and that he admitted having seen Lucia once or twice. Out of these few facts, which would have been useless to even a detective were he unable to treat them as mere clues to be followed carefully, the enterprising{143} people of Haynton constructed a number of stories, each of which hung together admirably. That they differed radically from one another was not the fault of the local romancers; they had honestly done their best with the material at hand.

Phil did not regard the matter in this light. When day by day his little brothers returned from school with tales they had heard from class-mates and wondered greatly that they had not first heard them at home, Phil’s temper broke loose so suddenly that the boys almost feared to repeat all they had heard. The wrathful young man learned that he had proposed to Lucia and been refused, that he had been accepted, apparently at the same interview, that Tramlay was to build a handsome house on the water front of Hayn Farm for his daughter as a wedding-present, that Phil took his refusal so seriously to heart that he was going to study for the ministry, and that while in New York he had fallen into drinking-habits so deeply that Tramlay had been obliged to write Farmer Hayn to hurry to the city and remove his unfortunate son from the scene of temptation.

Phil grumbled and stormed; he even vowed that if gossip about him did not end he would go to sea. He thought seriously of publishing a list of denials in the weekly paper, edited in the county town, which devoted a column or two to Haynton news. Then he wondered whether he might not make a confidant of the minister and beg that a sermon be preached on the sinfulness of gossip; but this plan disappeared abruptly when the statement of his{144} approaching marriage was traced, almost with certainty, to the minister himself.

But the worst trial of all remained. On Sunday he met at church and in the Young People’s Bible-Class all the girls who lived at or near Haynton. Some of them belonged to churches other than that which included the Hayn family among its members, but for once they waived denominational preferences and went to the First Church, and not only to see Phil’s new clothes and cane, of which Sol Mantring had brought such astonishing reports. They were as good and sweet-hearted, those Haynton girls, as any of their sex on the face of the earth: fashions a trifle old, and lack of professional advice as to how best to enhance their natural charms by borrowing from art, could not disguise the fact that some of them were quite pretty. It was not their fault that Phil’s heart had gone elsewhere for a mate, but that the young man himself was greatly to blame for such a course was the general opinion among them, and they would have at least the consolation of seeing how he had been affected by a step so unusual among Haynton youth. And what questions those girls’ eyes did ask! There was no need that they should put any of them into words; Phil understood them all, with the result that never before on Sunday had he heard so little of sermon, hymn, or prayer or betrayed so feeble a grasp of the topic of the day in the Bible-class.

So seriously was his mind disturbed that he held himself sharply to account, “examined his evidences{145}” in the time-honored and orthodox manner, and resolved that lack of occupation was at the bottom of his trouble. He would begin bright and early Monday morning an extension of the big ditch in the marsh land: if the mud and stones and roots and quicksands, the tugging and straining and perspiring, sure to be incident to the work, would not cure him, he grimly told himself, then his case was hopeless indeed.

Bravely he kept his word. At sunrise he was already on his way to the marsh, and by the middle of the morning a single sensation encompassed his entire mind: it was that ditching was the hardest, dirtiest, forlornest work that ever fell to a farmer’s lot. He dragged one heavily-booted foot after the other from the ooze, leaned on his spade, and offered himself five minutes’ rest. He looked wearily along the prolongation of the line of the ditch already completed, and wondered how many hundred days the entire improvement would require. ............