As soon as Beriah Sellers had bade his friends good night and seen them depart, he did not retire apartments in the Planter’s, but took his way to his lodgings with a friend in a distant part of the city.

CHAPTER XIV.

The letter that Philip Sterling wrote to Ruth Bolton, on the evening of setting out to seek his fortune in the west, found that young lady in her own father’s house in Philadelphia.  It was one of the pleasantest of the many charming suburban houses in that hospitable city, which is territorially one of the largest cities in the world, and only prevented from becoming the convenient metropolis of the country by the intrusive strip of Camden and Amboy sand which shuts it off from the Atlantic ocean.  It is a city of steady thrift, the arms of which might well be the deliberate but delicious terrapin that imparts such a royal flavor to its feasts.

It was a spring morning, and perhaps it was the influence of it that made Ruth a little restless, satisfied neither with the out-doors nor the in-doors.  Her sisters had gone to the city to show some country visitors Independence Hall, Girard College and Fairmount Water Works and Park, four objects which Americans cannot die peacefully, even in Naples, without having seen.  But Ruth confessed that she was tired of them, and also of the Mint.  She was tired of other things.  She tried this morning an air or two upon the piano, sang a simple song in a sweet but slightly metallic voice, and then seating herself by the open window, read Philip’s letter.  Was she thinking about Philip, as she gazed across the fresh lawn over the tree tops to the Chelton Hills, or of that world which his entrance, into her tradition-bound life had been one of the means of opening to her?  Whatever she thought, she was not idly musing, as one might see by the expression of her face.  After a time she took up a book; it was a medical work, and to all appearance about as interesting to a girl of eighteen as the statutes at large; but her face was soon aglow over its pages, and she was so absorbed in it that she did not notice the entrance of her mother at the open door.

“Ruth?”

“Well, mother,” said the young student, looking up, with a shade of impatience.

“I wanted to talk with thee a little about thy plans.”

“Mother; thee knows I couldn’t stand it at Westfield; the school stifled me, it’s a place to turn young people into dried fruit.”

“I know,” said Margaret Bolton, with a half anxious smile, thee chafes against all the ways of Friends, but what will thee do?  Why is thee so discontented?”

“If I must say it, mother, I want to go away, and get out of this dead level.”

With a look half of pain and half of pity, her mother answered, “I am sure thee is little interfered with; thee dresses as thee will, and goes where thee pleases, to any church thee likes, and thee has music.  I had a visit yesterday from the society’s committee by way of discipline, because we have a piano in the house, which is against the rules.”