ssed many deserted places,
mournful in their stagnation, overgrown with wild things, the houses
forlornly dismantled, perhaps with the roof sunken, the chimney toppled,
and the weather-beaten walls in ruinous decay. He was touched by these
places. The houses must have been built with high hope, and once have
been alive with full-hearted effort. Their walls had enclosed dreams and
joyous dramas. Then discouragement had fallen and the search for another
place of beginning. He wondered what had become of all the people who
had built these homes. He hoped they had begun in another place with
undimmed resolve and had found peace. Yet there were sinister hints that
their ghosts haunted these spots of their first failures, beseeching of
the ruins something of the first freshness of impulse.

He tried to tell Virginia Bartell that he, too, was like a deserted
farm, falling into ruin. But this only made her laugh. She could not
believe in failure, it seemed. And he laughed with her, after a little.
It was not possible, after all, to suppose that he could go on being a
ruin forever. These frustrated home makers must have succeeded at last,
and so would he. In some manner the girl herself became an assurance of
this. Her mere buoyancy uplifted him.

These times alone with the girl were not always to be had for the
asking. There abounded other youths who prized her companionship; able,
dauntless youths and skilled with accomplishments.

There was one of these, a tall young man, spectacled, of a high shiny
forehead, a student of a youth, who haunted the gray house like a
malignant wraith of erudition, and condescended to the girl almost as
flagrantly as he did to Ewing. His talk, whether of machinery or morals,
socialism or chemistry, was meant to instruct. Wherefore the girl slunk
from him, not always so skilfully as might have been wished--with far
less subtlety, indeed, than her aunt wished.

"I'm almost certain you offended him this afternoon," she remarked on a
day when they had fled flagrantly to the river, "though why you should
wish to avoid him is beyond me. You know that he's from one of the very
oldest families in West Roxbury." The girl's tone was penitent as she
answered: "But I'd promised to go in the canoe with Mr. Ewing." There
was no penitence, however, in the look she flashed at Ewing over her
aunt's shoulder, daring him to prove if he were a man. He nerved himself
in the glance.

"But you see, Mrs. Ranley, I'