But the young man was thinking nothing of this as he faced the cold and gleaming sky, to see the sun drop just to the north of Wachusett, as he had done so many winter nights since he took possession of the northwest corner of Galilee Hall. If his musing had been strictly translated into words, “I must prove my rank,” he would have said.
As he stood mute and rapt, seeming to bestow more brilliance than he took from it on the afterglow that filled the grim old room, his eye rested on the line of Professors’ houses that stood between him and his sunset, and musingly traveled from ancient roof to roof till it reached the house behind which the sun had dropped. This house was not built by the pious founders, and had a certain impertinent, worldly air as of a Professor with property, or a committee of the Trustees who conceded more than was expected by the Westminster Catechism to contemporaneous ease and architecture. It was in fact a fashionable modern building, a Queen Anne country house, neither more nor less.
As Bayard’s glance reached the home of his theological Professor it idly fell upon the second-story front window, where signs of motion chanced to arrest his attention. In this window the drawn shade was slowly raised, and the lace drapery curtains parted. A woman’s figure stood for a moment between the curtains. There were western windows, also, to the room, and the still burning light shot through from side to side of the wing. In it she could be seen clearly: she stood with raised arm and hand; there was something so warm and womanly and rich in the outlines of that remote figure that the young man would have been no young man if his glance had not rested upon it.
After a moment’s perceptible hesitation he turned away; then stepped back and drew down his old white cotton shade.
II.
More than thirty years before the day of this biography, a blue-eyed girl sat in her brother’s home in Beacon Street, weighing the problem which even then had begun to shake the social world every year at crocus time, Where shall we spend the summer?
When Mary Worcester’s gentle mind, wavering between the hills and the shore with the pleasant agitation of a girl who has never known any compulsion severer than her own young choice upon her fate, turned in the direction of the mountain village which her mother used to fancy, it seemed the least important of acts or facts, and was so regarded by her brother; for Hermon Worcester was a preoccupied young man, more absorbed in adding to his fortune, inherited in wool, than in studying the natural history of an attractive orphaned younger sister, left, obviously, by Providence upon his hands.
So, properly chaperoned and luxuriously outfitted, to the hills went Mary Worcester that conclusive summer of her life; and the village of Bethlehem—a handful then, a hamlet, if one should compare it with the luxurious and important place of resort known to our own day—received, as unconsciously as she gave, the presence of this young visitor whose lot was destined to become so fair a leaf bound in with the village history.