Page:The Fruit of the Tree (Wharton 1907).djvu/467

Rh outside the Lynbrook circle. After all, he had seen her chieﬂy not among her own friends but among his wife’s. Was it reasonable to suppose that a creature of her keen individuality would be content to subsist on the fringe of other existences? Somewhere, of course, she must have a centre of her own, must be subject to inﬂuences of which he was wholly ignorant. And since her departure from Lynbrook he had known even less of her life. She had spent the previous winter with Mr. Langhope in New York, where Amherst had seen her only on his rare visits to Cicely; and Mr. Langhope, on going abroad for the summer, had established his grand-daughter in a Bar Harbour cottage, where, save for two ﬂying visits from Mrs. Ansell, Miss Brent had reigned alone till his return in September.

Very likely, Amherst reﬂected, the mysterious visitor was a Bar Harbour acquaintance—no, more than an acquaintance: a friend. And as Mr. Langhope’s party had left Mount Desert but three days previously, the arrival of the unknown at Hanaford showed a singular impatience to rejoin Miss Brent.

As he reached this point in his meditations, Amherst found himself at the street—corner where it was his habit to pick up the Westmore trolley. Just as it bore down on him, and he sprang to the platform, another car, coming in from the mills, stopped to discharge its [ 451 ]