Goaded and spurred by these mysterious outsiders, the village people began to act aloof, and the more ignorant of them sullen toward us ... but as yet it was only in the air, nothing concrete to lay hold of.

* * * * *

Mrs. Suydam had run away with her plumber ... the interviews she gave out showed that it was our case mainly that had impelled her to launch forth in imitation ...

Others, in a wave of sex-radicalism, were running off together all about the country ...

But it was Mrs. Suydam’s case that interested me and Hildreth most ... she was a dainty, pretty little slight thing, as Hildreth was—­I could judge by her pictures....

“Hildreth,” I urged, “let’s drop Mrs. Suydam a note encouraging her ... she’s probably without a friend in the world, she and her man ... they’re trying to oust her from her flat ... she’s being hounded about.”

“My God, Johnnie dear, let’s don’t! ... they’ll only give our letter to the papers ... let’s let well enough alone once more ... the grocer boy passed me in the street to-day and didn’t tip his hat to me.”

* * * * *

I was sitting at Mrs. Rond’s tea-table having afternoon tea with her.  She had sent one of her girls over to the cottage to tell me she wished to see me “alone” ... “on a matter of great importance.”

The cats, who had trailed her eldest daughter, Editha, across to our place, followed us back again with sailing tails in the air.

Mrs. Rond poured me a cup of strong tea.

“Drink that first, then I’ll give you a little information that won’t be so very agreeable to you.”

The glimmer of satiric yet benevolent humour that was never long absent from her eyes, lightened there again, as she rolled and lit a “Plowboy.”

“Have you noticed a change in the weather?  A storm is blowing up.  I’m speaking figuratively ...  I might as well out with it, Johnnie,—­there’s a report, growing in strength, that a mob of townspeople is scheduled to come your way to-night, some time, and treat you to a serenade of protest and the traditional yokel hospitality of mobs ... a coat of tar and feathers and a ride on a rail beyond the town limits.”

“So it’s come to that, has it?”

“Johnnie, it isn’t the townsfolk that started it ... of that I am certain ... left alone, they would still have been content to mind their business, and accept you and Hildreth on a friendly basis....”

She brought up the story of the strange men haranguing from street corners again....

“It’s the New York newspapers, or one or two of the most sensational of them, that are back of this new phase.”

“You mean, Mrs. Rond, that they would dare go so far as to instigate an attack on me and Hildreth ... with possibly fatal results?”

“Of course they would ... they need more news ... they want something more to happen ... to have all this uproar end tamely in happy, permanent love—­that’s what they couldn’t endure....