While they waited, Loring’s thoughts were busy with many things, friendly solicitude for the exile serving as the point of departure.  He knew what a handfast friend might know:  how Kent had finished his postgraduate course in the law and had succeeded to his father’s small practice in the New Hampshire county town where he was born and bred.  Also, he knew how Kent’s friends, college friends who knew his gifts and ability, had deprecated the burial; and he himself had been curious enough to pay Kent a visit to spy out the reason why.  On their first evening together in the stuffy little law office which had been his father’s, Kent had made a clean breast of it:  there was a young woman in the case, and a promise passed before Kent had gone to college.  She was a farmer’s daughter, with no notion for a change of environment; wherefore she had determined Kent’s career and the scene of it, laying its lines in the narrow field of her own choosing.

Later, as Loring knew, the sentimental anchor had dragged until it was hopelessly off holding-ground.  The young woman had laid the blame at the door of the university, had given Kent a bad half-year of fault-finding and recrimination, and had finally made an end of the matter by bestowing her dowry of hillside acres on the son of a neighboring farmer.

Thereafter Kent had stagnated quietly, living with simple rigor the life he had marked out for himself; thankful at heart, Loring had suspected, for the timely intervention of the farmer’s son, but holding himself well in hand against a repetition of the sentimental offense.  All this until the opening of the summer hotel at the foot of Old Croydon, and the coming of Elinor Brentwood.

No one knew just how much Miss Brentwood had to do with the long-delayed awakening of David Kent; but in Loring’s forecastings she enjoyed the full benefit of the doubt.  From tramping the hills alone, or whipping the streams for brook trout, David had taken to spending his afternoons with lover-like regularity at the Croydon Inn; and at the end of the season had electrified the sleepy home town by declaring his intention to go West and grow up with the country.

In Loring’s setting-forth of the awakening, the motive was not far to seek.  Miss Brentwood was ambitious, and if her interest in Kent had been only casual she would not have been likely to point him to the wider battle-field.  Again, apart from his modest patrimony, Kent had only his profession.  The Brentwoods were not rich, as riches are measured in millions; but they lived in their own house in the Back Bay wilderness, moved in Boston’s older substantial circle, and, in a world where success, economic or other, is in some sort the touchstone, were many social planes above a country lawyer.

Loring knew Kent’s fierce poverty-pride—­none better.  Hence, he was at no loss to account for the exile’s flight afield, or for his unhopeful present attitude.  Meaning to win trophies to lay at Miss Brentwood’s feet, the present stage of the rough joust with Fortune found him unhorsed, unweaponed and rolling in the dust of the lists.