“Hardly under a week. I want to finish up everything and come home for a good long spell.”
With these words she descended to the road, valise in hand, buckled it to the saddle, and mounted the horse. Then she said good-bye to Martha, and rode briskly away, down the Philadelphia road.
Several days passed and nothing was heard of her. Gilbert Potter remained on his farm, busy with the labor of the opening spring; Mark Deane was absent, taking measurements and making estimates for the new house, and Sally Fairthorn spent all her spare time in spinning flax for a store of sheets and table-cloths, to be marked “S. A. F.” in red silk, when duly woven, hemmed, and bleached.
One afternoon, during Miss Lavender's absence, Dr. Deane was again called upon to attend Old-man Barton. It was not an agreeable duty, for the Doctor suspected that something more than medical advice was in question. He had not visited the farm-house since his discovery of Martha's attachment to Gilbert Potter,—had even avoided intercourse with Alfred Barton, towards whom his manner became cold and constrained. It was a sore subject in his thoughts, and both the Bartons seemed to be, in some manner, accessory to his disappointment.
The old man complained of an attack of “buzzing in the head,” which molested him at times, and for which bleeding was the Doctor's usual remedy. His face had a flushed, congested, purple hue, and there was an unnatural glare in his eyes; but the blood flowed thickly and sluggishly from his skinny arm, and a much longer time than usual elapsed before he felt relieved.
“Gad, Doctor!” he said, when the vein had been closed, “the spring weather brings me as much fulness as a young buck o' twenty. I'd be frisky yet, if't wasn't for them legs. Set down, there; you've news to tell me!”
“I think, Friend Barton,” Dr. Deane answered, “thee'd better be quiet a spell. Talking isn't exactly good for thee.”
“Eh?” the old man growled; “maybe you'd like to think so, Doctor. If I am house-bound, I pick up some things as they go around. And I know why you let our little matter drop so suddent.”
He broke off with a short, malicious laugh, which excited the Doctor's ire. The latter seated himself, smoothed his garments and his face, became odorous of bergamot and wintergreen, and secretly determined to repay the old man for this thrust.
“I don't know what thee may have heard, Friend Barton,” he remarked, in his blandest voice. “There is always plenty of gossip in this neighborhood, and some persons, no doubt, have been too free with my name,—mine and my daughter's, I may say. But I want thee to know that that has nothing to do with the relinquishment of my visits to thee. If thee's curious to learn the reason, perhaps thy son Alfred may be able to give it more circumstantially than I can.”