t meadow below, and
old memories of his childhood and college life softened his heart. He
forgot the double-line fences and determined to go on the morrow to
Drayton Hall and make up the quarrel. He would offer the first overture
and a full declaration of regret, and this, he was quite sure, would
make it up. Once he actually turned his horse around to go straight
across the fields as he used to do in his boyhood, but there below him
were the double-line fences stretching brown and clear. No horse could
get over them, and around the road it was a good five miles, so he
turned back again and rode home and the chance was lost.

On his arrival he found a summons in a suit which had been instituted
that day by Wilmer Drayton for damages to his land by reason of his
turning the water of the creek upon him.

Mr. Hampden did not forbid old Lydia to take his boy down there again,
but he went to the meadow no more himself, and when he and Wilmer
Drayton met next, which was not for some time, they barely spoke.

III

Young Oliver Hampden grew up clear eyed, strong, and good to look at,
and became shy where girls were concerned, and most of all appeared to
be shy with Lucy Drayton. He went to college and as he got his broad
shoulders and manly stride he got over his shyness with most girls, but
not with Lucy Drayton. With her, he appeared to have become yet more
reserved. She had inherited her mother's eyes and beauty, with the
fairness of a lily; a slim, willowy figure; a straight back and a small
head set on her shoulders in a way that showed both blood and pride.
Moreover, she had character enough, as her friends knew: those gray eyes
that smiled could grow haughty with disdain or flash with indignation,
and she had taught many an uppish young man to feel her keen irony.

"She gets only her intellect from the Dray-tons; her beauty and her
sweetness come from her mother," said a lady of the neighborhood to
Judge Hampden, thinking to please him.

"She gets both her brains and beauty from her mother and only her name
from her father," snapped the Judge, who had often seen her at church,
and never without recalling Lucy Fielding as he knew her.

That she and young Oliver Hampden fought goes without saying. But no
one knew why she was cruelly bitter to a young man who once spoke
slightingly of Oliver, or why Oliver, who rarely saw her except at
church, took up a quarrel of hers so furiously.

*****

The outbreak of