“Inza!” he murmured. “Perhaps it is best. You—you were the sweetheart of my boyhood days. Fate must have intended you for me.”
Up and down the room he strode, his breast heaving, his cheeks flushed.
“Starbright,” he laughed, “you’ll have to stand aside, old fellow! I can’t have you take her from me! You know, and I hardly think you’ll object. I’ll find her at your home, and, during these merry holidays, I’ll win her promise to be mine forever.”
He fancied the struggle was over, and he flung open his window to admit the cold night air. It fanned his hot forehead, and he drank it in with long, deep breaths. Leaning on the window-sill, he looked out upon the campus, where a solitary student walked hastily along, the frosty ground seeming to creak and complain beneath his feet.
Then he turned back into the room, closing the window. A moment he stood looking down at Elsie’s crumpled note. Suddenly a quiver ran over him, and he stooped, picked up the paper, smoothed it out, and thrust it into a pocket near his heart.
CHAPTER XXX
DICK STARBRIGHT’S HOME.
On the southeastern shore of Seneca Lake, not many miles from the little village of Burdett, stood the handsome home of the Starbrights. Old Captain Starbright had purchased this splendid country place, intending to settle down there some time, far from sight and sound of the grim and restless ocean, to spend the latter part of his life in peace and quietude. But his dream of peaceful old age in the bosom of his family had never been realized, for he died in the cabin of his vessel far from his native land. Gossip said he drank himself to death.
However, he had made a comfortable fortune, and the home he left to his widow and children was an ideal one. He had enlarged and remodeled the old country house till it was regarded by the neighbors as a veritable palace. He had spent large sums on the surrounding grounds, and his landscape gardening was the wonder and awe of the plain people of that section of the country. Not a few of them declared he was determined to bankrupt himself by his foolish extravagance in these matters; but the result of his labors was pleasing to the eye, to say the least.
The homestead was situated on a hill that sloped gently westward to the shore of the lake, where the captain built a handsome boat-house. From Watkins, on the south, to Geneva, on the north, Seneca Lake is fifty miles long, and there is plenty of yachting to be had, for which purpose the old mariner purchased a handsome sloop, and Dick had been taught to handle her with the skill of a veteran.