“He is a good boy, Abigail, and if she’s got her heart set on him she shall have him.”

“You don’t know that her heart is set on him, Eben.  I think the best thing we can do is to send her down to Boston for a little visit—­she may feel differently when she comes home.”

“I won’t have her crossed, Abigail.  Was she crying when you left her?”

“She will soon be quiet and go to sleep.  I am going to make some toast for her supper.  Eben, where are you going?” The Squire had set forth for the door in a determined rush.

“I am going to see that boy, and know what this work means,” he cried, in a loud voice of wrath and pity.

However, Abigail’s vivacious persistency of common-sense usually overcame her husband’s clumsy headlongs of affection.  She carried the day at last, and the Squire subsided, though with growls of remonstrance, like a partially tamed animal.

“Have your way, and send her down to Boston, if you want to, Abigail,” said he; “but when she comes back she shall have whatever she wants, if I move heaven and earth to get it for her.”

So that day week Jerome, going one morning to his work, stood aside to let the stage-coach pass him, and had a glimpse of Lucina’s fair face in the wave of a blue veil at the window.  She bowed, but the stage dashed by in such a fury of dust that Jerome could scarcely discern the tenor of the salutation.  He thought that she smiled, and not unhappily.  “She is going away,” he told himself; “she will go to parties, and see other people, and forget me.”  He tried to dash the bitterness of his heart at the thought, with the sweetness of unselfish love, but it was hard.  He plodded on to his work, the young springiness gone from his back and limbs, his face sternly downcast.

As for Lucina, she was in reality leaving Upham not unhappily.  She was young, and the sniff of change is to the young as the smell of powder to a war-horse.  New fields present always wide ranges of triumphant pleasure to youth.

Lucina, moreover, loved with girlish fervor the friend, Miss Rose Soley, whom she was going to visit in Boston.  She had not seen her for some months, and she tasted in advance the sweets of mutual confidences.  That morning Jerome’s face was a little confused in Lucina’s mind with that of a rosy-cheeked and dark-ringleted girl, and young passion somewhat dimmed by gentle affection for one of her own sex.

Then, too, Lucina had come, during the last few days, to a more cheerful and hopeful view of the situation.  After all, Jerome loved her, and was not that the principal thing?  Perhaps, in time, it would all come right.  Jerome might get rich; in the meantime, she was in no hurry to be married and leave her parents, and if Jerome would only come to see her, that would be enough to make her very happy.  She thought that after her return he would very probably come.  She reasoned, as she thought, astutely, that he would not be able to help it, when he saw her after a long absence.  Then she had much faith in her father’s being able to arrange this satisfactorily for her, as he had arranged all other matters during her life.