two 'undred an' forty screams in vun!'"

But such sentiments as these troubled Harry Temple not one whit. He cared
not whether the present century had a railroad or whether it travelled by
foot. He would not lift a white finger to help it along or hinder. As the
talk went on he was considering how and where he might get his supper.

CHAPTER XVIII

The weather turned suddenly cold and raw that Fall, and almost in one day,
the trees that had been green, or yellowing in the sunshine, put on their
autumn garments of defeat, flaunted them for a brief hour, and dropped
them early in despair. The pleasant woods, to which Marcia had fled in her
dismay, became a mass of finely penciled branches against a wintry sky,
save for the one group of tall pines that hung out heavy above the rest,
and seemed to defy even snowy blasts.

Marcia could see those pines from her kitchen window, and sometimes as she
worked, if her heart was heavy, she would look out and away to them, and
think of the day she laid her head down beneath them to sob out her
trouble, and awoke to find comfort. Somehow the memory of that little talk
that she and David had then grew into vast proportions in her mind, and
she loved to cherish it.

There had come letters from home. Her stepmother had written, a stiff, not
unloving letter, full of injunctions to be sure to remember this, and not
do that, and on no account to let any relative or neighbor persuade her
out of the ways in which she had been brought up. She was attempting to do
as many mothers do, when they see the faults in the child they have
brought up, try to bring them up over again. At some of the sentences a
wild homesickness took possession of her. Some little homely phrase about
one of the servants, or the mention of a pet hen or cow, would bring the
longing tears to her eyes, and she would feel that she must throw away
this new life and run back to the old one.

School was begun at home. Mary Ann and Hanford would be taking the long
walk back and forth together twice a day to the old school-house. She half
envied them their happy, care-free life. She liked to think of the shy
courting that she had often seen between scholars in the upper classes.
Her imagination pleased itself sometimes when she was going to sleep,
trying to picture out the school goings and home comings, and their sober
talk. Not that she ever looked back to Hanford Weston with regret, no