The next day Ordway passed at the same hour, still on the opposite side of the street. After this she began to watch regularly for his figure, looking for it when it appeared on Mrs. Twine's little porch, and following it wistfully until it was lost beyond the new brick church at the corner. She was not aware of cultivating a facile sentiment about the stranger, but place a riotous imagination in an empty house and it requires little effort to weave a romance from the opposite side of the street. Distance, that subtle magnifier of attachments, had come to her aid now as it had failed her in the person of Harry Banks. Even from across the street it was impossible to invest Mr. Banks with any quality which might have suggested an historic background or a mysterious past. He was flagrantly, almost outrageously himself; in no fictitious circumstances could he have appeared as anything except the unvarnished fact that he was. No legendary light could have glorified his features or improved the set of his trousers—which had taken their shape and substance from the legs within. With these features and in these trousers, she felt that he must usurp the sacred precincts where her dream had dwelt. "It would all be so easy if one could only be born where one belongs," she cried out hopelessly, in the unconscious utterance of a philosophy larger than her own.
And so as the week went by, she allowed her rosy fancies to surround the figure that passed three times daily along the sidewalk across the way. In the morning he walked by with a swinging stride; at midday he passed rapidly, absorbed in thought; in the evening he came back slowly, sometimes stopping to watch the sunset from the brow of the hill. Not since the first morning had he turned his blue eyes toward Milly's gate.
At the end of the month Mr. Banks returned to Tappahannock from a business trip through the tobacco districts. He was an ugly, freckled face, sandy-haired young fellow—an excellent judge of tobacco—with a simple soul that attired itself in large checks, usually of a black and white variety. On the day of his first visit to Milly he wore a crimson necktie pierced by a scarf-pin bearing a turtle-dove in diamonds.
"Who's that fellow over there?" he inquired as Ordway came up the hill to his dinner. "I wonder if he's the chap Hudge was telling me about at breakfast?"
"Oh, I don't know," answered Milly, in a voice that sounded flat in her own ears. "Nobody knows anything about him, father says. But what was Hudge telling you?" she asked, impelled by a devouring yet timid curiosity.
"Well, if he's the man I mean, he seems to be a kind of revivalist out of a job—or something or other queer. Hudge says he broke up a fight last Saturday evening in Kelly's saloon—that's the place you've never heard the name of, I reckon," he added hesitatingly, "it's where all the factory hands gather after work on Saturday to drink up their week's wages."
For once Milly's interest was stronger than her modesty.
"And did he fight?" she demanded in a suspense that was almost breathless.
"He wasn't there, you know—only passing along the street outside, at least that's what they say—when the rumpus broke out. Then he went in through the window and——"
"And?" repeated Milly, with an entrancing vision of heroic blows, for beneath her soft exterior the blood of the primitive woman flowed.