Less than kin

by Alice Duer Miller

As he went through the hall, Nellie’s voice called to him from a neighboring room—“Bob.”

He came and stood in the doorway. The lovers were seated at a discreet distance. Emmons had paused like a man interrupted in the midst of a sentence. Vickers felt convinced that he had been “laying down the law.”

“If you are going out, Bob, please be sure to come home before half-past ten. My uncle is so easily disturbed.”

Vickers looked at her reflectively, debating whether if he were late she would wait up, for the pleasure of scolding him. But there was nothing encouraging in her manner, and to be let in by Plimpton would hardly be rewarding.

Chapter VI

He was unprepared for the size and magnificence of the Overton house. If he had been an older resident of Hilltop, he would have known that to visit the daughter of Balby Overton was a thing not to be done unadvisedly or lightly. It was an occasion to be dressed for, and mentioned afterward, with a casualness only apparent.

But Vickers knew nothing of this,—only knew that a pretty girl had asked him to visit her, and that an evening had soon presented itself when he found it convenient to go. Nor would he, for his nature lacked reverence, have been very much impressed at knowing that Overton was thought a great man in the neighborhood. He had begun life like all the other men in Hilltop, had skated and swum in the river with the rest, had gone to school with the other boys, and had not, as they delighted to remember, been very wise or very industrious. Afterward he had studied law and then gone into a law-office in the nearest large town. From that moment he had begun to rise; so that the old conservative firm which had consented to receive him as a clerk was now generally spoken of as “Overton’s partners.” He was considered the first lawyer in the state, and spoken of as the next senator. He was known, too, to have made money.

And yet he had never moved away from Hilltop. Hilltop itself expected it, and waited anxiously for the first symptom; waited to hear him complain of the heat of summer, or the exigencies of his daughter’s education. He never spoke of either. Perhaps political reasons chained him, or perhaps he was not above enjoying the position of a big man in a small place, or possibly he was bound by an affection for the neighborhood where he was born and bred. In any case, he built himself a new house, and an anomalous being, whose position Hilltop never clearly understood, came and laid out the grounds—a “landscape gardener” was understood to be his official title. Hilltop on the whole disapproved of him. He planted strange trees, and they asked each other why it was, “if Balby wanted trees so bad, he didn’t build his house down in the woods.”

But Overton himself remained unchanged—unchanged at least as far as any one could judge. He still came to town meetings and quarreled with Dr. Briggs just as he had always done. It is true that certain people who had always called him “Balby,” or even “Scrawny” (for he was thin), began now to let slip an occasional “Mr. Overton,” but he still took the 8.12 train in the morning, and the 5.37 in the afternoon; his daughter still went among them like all the other daughters of Hilltop; and if he had not had a big house, and strange, obscure, but very expensive objects understood to be “first editions,” no one could have laid a finger on any alteration in him.

Vickers did not, of course, know anything of all this, did not notice the impressive gate, or the iron palings, or anything until a large stone house loomed up before him in the moonlight. Then, after he had rung the bell, he turned to look at the view, and as he withdrew his eyes from the soft shadowy rolling country, he saw that in the foreground was a long marble balustrade, and beyond this, marble seats and fountains that stood out sharply against a background of cedars.