"Mrs. Pegrim, I don't know just how long you may be called to visit here, but longer or shorter, recollect one thing, you'll have no call to think about my business nor to talk about it to me, but just to keep quiet."
"Don't you want me to visit or have speech with the neighbors?" pleaded Satira, her cheery voice dropping to a ludicrous whimper, as the vision of social cups of tea flavored by neighborhood gossip began to fade.
"I don't ask anybody to do what they manifestly according to nature can't; I said me!" retorted Gilbert, about whose long forefinger the lady baby had gripped her hand as a bird clings to its perch.
CHAPTER IV
THE FELTONS
A month crept by with warm rains at the end of it, and the spring called the blood back to the pale tree-tops with a bound.
Though the people of Harley's Mills did not by any means hibernate in woodchuck fashion during winter, they did conserve their forces after the habits of their thrifty forebears and did not light or heat any more of their usually ample houses than was absolutely necessary. A strong tie of kinship threaded the whole community. The stately residents of Quality Hill and Westboro Road were often second and third cousins of the owners of the lonely hill farms, of the blacksmith at the cross-roads, or the joiner and carpenter, whose correct eye and a self-taught course of mechanical drawing enabled him to supply plans when required. Nor did this carpenter think it necessary to call himself an architect and builder, as he would to-day, in order to back his claims to consideration.
No one was jealous because the Misses Felton, year after year, went to New York after Thanksgiving, and returned via the South late in May. Rather were their doings a sort of general stimulant and tonic, administered in regular doses through the letters that Miss Emmy Felton wrote weekly to pretty little Mrs. Latimer, the Episcopal minister's wife, who had a love of life beyond the radius of eight hundred a year, while Miss Felton herself was in constant communication with her steward, Wheeler, as to every detail of the management of the place, so that all Harley's Mills knew exactly what to expect before it happened.
With the other wealthy landowner of the town the conditions were wholly different. When John Angus left his house for travel or the city, the gates were closed as far as knowledge of him was concerned. Ever since he had come home to take the property at his father's death, twelve years before, he had been a builder of barriers, not only between himself and those he thought beneath him, but he hedged himself with ceremony in his own household, his own inflexible will being his universal measure, and every act being in accord with a fixed plan. If, in his dislikes, he was deliberate and inexorable, those who knew him said that it was the same with his passions; in nothing had he the saving grace of spontaneity. Small wonder that his roseleaf wife withered by his side until some final shock, too strong for her endurance, swept her away to die in oblivion.