"How long he tarries in Zane's homestead!" said the people that spring. "Hasn't he settled that estate yet?"
"It never will be settled if he can help it," said public Echo, "as long as there are two fine young women there, and one of them so fascinating over men!"
Indeed, Duff Salter received letters, anonymous, of course—the anonymous letter was then the suburban press—admonishing him to beware of his siren hostess.
"She has ruined two men," said the elegant female handwriting before observed. "You must want to be the subject of a coroner's inquest. That house is bloody and haunted, rich Mr. Duff Salter! Beware of Lady Agnes, the murderess! Beware, too, of her accomplice, the insinuating little Byerly!"
Duff Salter walked out one day to make the tour of Kensington. He passed out the agreeable old Frankford road, with its wayside taverns, and hay carts, and passing omnibuses, and occasional old farm-like houses, interspersed with newer residences of a city character, and he strolled far up Cohocksink Creek till it meandered through billowy fields of green, and skirted the edges of woods, and all the way was followed by a path made by truant boys. Sitting down by a spring that gushed up at the foot of a great sycamore tree, the grandly bearded traveller, all flushed with the roses of exercise, made no unpleasing picture of a Pan waiting for Echo by appointment, or holding talk with the grazing goats of the poor on the open fields around him.
"How changed!" spoke the traveller aloud. "I have caught fishes all along this brook, and waded up its bed in summer to cool my feet. The girl was beside me whose slender feet in innocent exposure were placed by mine to shame their coarser mould. We thought we were in love, or as near it as are the outskirts to some throbbing town partly instinctive with a coming civic destiny. Alas! the little brook that once ran unvexed to the river, freshening green marshes at its outlet, has become a sewer, discolored with dyes of factories, and closed around by tenements and hovels till its purer life is over. My playmate, too, flowed on to womanhood, till the denser social conditions shut her in; she mingled the pure current of her life with another more turgid, and dull-eyed children, like houses of the suburbs, are builded on her bosom. I am alone, like this old tree, beside the spring where once I was a sapling, and still, like its waters, youth wells and wells, and keeps us yet both green in root. Come back, O Love! and freshen me, and, like a rill, flow down my closing years!"
Duff Salter's shoulder was touched as he ceased to speak, and he found young Calvin Van de Lear behind him.
"I have followed you out to the country," said the young man, howling in the elder's ear, "because I wanted to talk to you aloud, as I couldn't do in Kensington."
Duff Salter drew his storied ivory tablets on the divinity student, and said, crisply, "Write!"
"No, old man, that's not my style. It's too slow. Besides, it admits of nothing impressive being said, and I want to convince you."