"Yes, I know; I know. And you're going with splendid people. I've known the Starbirds all my life. None better in the country."
They had reached the summit of the elevation overlooking the valley that holds Chestnut Hill. Spring lay all about them in a riot of fresh green. The world, to boyish eyes, had never before looked so fair, nor had the present ever before been filled with brighter promises for the future. But the morning ride, delightful as it had been, was drawing to an end.
Coming from Cobb's Corners into Chestnut Hill you go down the Main street past Bannerhall. Pen looked as he went by, but he saw no one there. The lawn was rich with a carpet of fresh, young grass, the crocus beds and the tulip plot were ablaze with color, and the swelling buds that crowned the maples with a haze and halo of elusive pink foretold the luxury of summer foliage. But no human being was in sight. The street looked strange to Pen as they drove along; as strange as though he had been away two years instead of two months. They stopped in front of the post-office, and he remained in the wagon and minded the horse while Henry Cobb went into a hardware store near by. People passed back and forth, and some of them looked at him and said "good-morning," in a distant way, as though it were an effort for them to speak to him. He knew the cause of their indifference and he did not resent it, though it cut him deeply. Last winter it would have been different. But last winter he was the grandson of Colonel Richard Butler, and lived with that old patriot amid the memories and luxuries of Bannerhall. To-day he was the grandson of Enos Walker, of Cobb's Corners, leaving the farm to seek a petty job in a mill, discredited in the eyes of the community because of his disloyalty to his country's flag. He was musing on these things when some one called to him from the sidewalk. It was Aunt Millicent.
"Pen Butler!" she cried, "get right down here and kiss me."
Pen did her bidding.
"What in the world are you doing here?" she continued.
"I'm on my way to Lowbridge," he said. "I have a job up there in the Starbird woolen mills, as bobbin-boy."
"Well, for goodness sake! Who would have thought it? Pen Butler going to work as a bobbin-boy! And Lowbridge is fourteen miles away, and we shall never see you again."
Pen comforted her as best he could, and explained his reasons for going, and then he asked after the health of his grandfather Butler.
"Don't ask me," she said disconsolately. "He's grieving himself into his grave about you. But he doesn't say a word, and he won't let me say a word. Oh, dear!"