“Oh yes, we are old friends.  Philip used to come to Fallkill often while he was in college.  He was once rusticated here for a term.”

“Rusticated?”

“Suspended for some College scrape.  He was a great favorite here.  Father and he were famous friends.  Father said that Philip had no end of nonsense in him and was always blundering into something, but he was a royal good fellow and would come out all right.”

“Did you think he was fickle?”

“Why, I never thought whether he was or not,” replied Alice looking up.  “I suppose he was always in love with some girl or another, as college boys are.  He used to make me his confidant now and then, and be terribly in the dumps.”

“Why did he come to you?” pursued Ruth you were younger than he.”

“I’m sure I don’t know.  He was at our house a good deal.  Once at a picnic by the lake, at the risk of his own life, he saved sister Millie from drowning, and we all liked to have him here.  Perhaps he thought as he had saved one sister, the other ought to help him when he was in trouble.  I don’t know.”

The fact was that Alice was a person who invited confidences, because she never betrayed them, and gave abundant sympathy in return.  There are persons, whom we all know, to whom human confidences, troubles and heart-aches flow as naturally its streams to a placid lake.

This is not a history of Fallkill, nor of the Montague family, worthy as both are of that honor, and this narrative cannot be diverted into long loitering with them.  If the reader visits the village to-day, he will doubtless be pointed out the Montague dwelling, where Ruth lived, the cross-lots path she traversed to the Seminary, and the venerable chapel with its cracked bell.

In the little society of the place, the Quaker girl was a favorite, and no considerable social gathering or pleasure party was thought complete without her.  There was something in this seemingly transparent and yet deep character, in her childlike gaiety and enjoyment of the society about her, and in her not seldom absorption in herself, that would have made her long remembered there if no events had subsequently occurred to recall her to mind.

To the surprise of Alice, Ruth took to the small gaieties of the village with a zest of enjoyment that seemed foreign to one who had devoted her life to a serious profession from the highest motives.  Alice liked society well enough, she thought, but there was nothing exciting in that of Fallkill, nor anything novel in the attentions of the well-bred young gentlemen one met in it.  It must have worn a different aspect to Ruth, for she entered into its pleasures at first with curiosity, and then with interest and finally with a kind of staid abandon that no one would have deemed possible for her.  Parties, picnics, rowing-matches, moonlight strolls, nutting expeditions in the October woods,—­Alice declared that it was a whirl of dissipation.  The fondness of Ruth, which was scarcely disguised, for the company of agreeable young fellows, who talked nothings, gave Alice opportunity for no end of banter.