Tom was standing very close to her as he spoke; when she answered it was hardly above her breath, but low as the whisper was he caught it—
“Yes.”
Ah me! those days have gone by now, and I am an old man of four score years and more, but even yet my old heart thrills at the remembrance of this that I here write. Manifold troubles and griefs have fallen upon me betwixt then and now; yet, I can say, when one speaks to me of the weariness of this world and of the emptiness of things within it, “Surely, life is a pleasant thing, when it holds such joys in store for us as this,—the bliss of loving and of being loved.”
Half an hour afterward, Tom was walking down the road toward the old mill-house, and in his hand he held the hand of his darling—his first love—and life was very beautiful to him.
CHAPTER III.
NOW, although the good people of Eastcaster were very glad to welcome Tom Granger home again whenever he returned from a cruise, at the same time they looked upon him with a certain wariness, or shyness, for they could not but feel that he was not quite one of themselves.
Now-a-days one sees all kinds of strange people; the railroad brings them,—young men who sell dry-goods, books and what not. They have traveled all over the country and have, or think that they have, a world more of knowledge about things in general than other people who are old enough to be their father’s father. Such an one I saw this morning, who beat me three games of chequers, which, I own, did vex me; though any one might have done the same, for I was thinking of other things at the time, and my mind was not fixed upon the run of the game. One sees plenty of such people now-a-days, I say, but in the old times it was different, and few strangers came to Eastcaster, so that but little was known of the outside world. The good people liked well enough to hear Tom tell of the many out-of-the-way things that had happened to him during his knocking about in the world; at the same time there was always a feeling amongst them that he was different from themselves. Tom knew that they felt this way, and it made him more shy of going amongst his father’s neighbors than he would otherwise have been. Nothing makes a man withdraw within himself as much as the thought that those about him neither understand him nor care to understand him. So it came about that Elihu Penrose was not very much pleased with that which had passed between Tom Granger and his daughter.
As Tom and Patty walked home hand in hand, hardly a word was said betwixt them. When they came to the gate in front of the mill-house they saw that Elihu was not on the porch.