nd she must be patient and wait.

She was glad she had gone without delay to Mary Ballard. The two women
were fond of each other, and the visit had been most satisfactory.
Betty she had not seen, for the maiden was still sleeping the long,
heavy sleep which saves a normal healthy body from wreck after severe
emotion. Betty was so young--it might be best that matters should wait
awhile as they were.

If Peter Junior went to Paris now, he would have to earn his own way,
of course, and possibly he had gone west with Richard where he could
earn faster than at home. Maybe that had been the grounds of the
quarrel. Surely she would hear from him soon. Perhaps he had taken
their talk on Sunday afternoon as a good-by to her; or he might yet
come to her and tell her his plans. So she comforted herself in the
most wholesome and natural way.

Richard's action in taking his valise away during her absence and
leaving no word of farewell for her was more of a surprise to her. But
then--he might have resented the Elder's attitude and sided with his
cousin. Or, he might have feared he would say things he would
afterwards regret, if he appeared, and so have taken himself quietly
away. Still, these reasons did not wholly appeal to her, and she was
filled with misgivings for him even more than for her son.

Peter Junior she trusted absolutely and Richard she loved as a son;
but there was much of his father in him, and the Irish nature was
erratic and wild, as the Elder said. Where was that father now? No
one knew. It was one of the causes for anxiety she had for the boy
that his father had been lost to them all ever since Richard's birth
and his wife's death. He had gone out of their lives as completely as
a candle in a gale of wind. She had mothered the boy, and the Elder
had always been kind to him for his own dead sister's sake, but of the
father they never spoke.

It was while Hester Craigmile sat in her western window, thinking her
thoughts, that two lads came hurrying down the bluff from the old camp
ground, breathless and awed. One carried a straw hat, and the other a
stout stick--a stick with an irregular knob at the end. It was Larry
Kildene's old blackthorn that Peter Junior had been carrying. The
Ballards' home was on the way between the bluff and the village, and
Mary Ballard was standing at their gate watching for the children from
school. She wished Jamie to go on an errand for her.

Mary noticed the agitation of the b