Page:The New Penelope.djvu/176

 completely he was master of himself, or, in short, for any motive whatever, he was taken in his own devices, and compelled to surrender unconditionally. Like the man in Scripture, out of whom the devils were cast only to return, his last estate was worse than the first, as he was soon compelled to acknowledge; and one of the first signs of this relapse into fatuity was the resumption of work on the unfinished house, and the ornamentation of the neglected grounds.

"I will make it such a place as she cannot refuse," he said to himself, more or less hopefully. "She will have to accept the house and grounds, with me thrown in. And whatever she is pining for, she is pining, that I can see. It may be for outdoor air and recreation, and the care which a husband only can give her. If it be that she can take them along with me."

Thus it was, that when Chillis brought Willie home from his long visit to the woods and streams, he saw the workmen busy on the Captain's house. He heard, too, about the excursion to the cape, and the inevitable comments upon Rumway's proceedings. But he said nothing about it to Mrs. Smiley, though he spent the evening in the snug little parlor, and they talked together of many things personally interesting to both; especially about Willie's education and profession in life.

"He ought to go to college," said his mother. "I wish him to be a scholarly man, whatever profession he decides upon afterward. I could not bear that he should not have a liberal education."

"Yes, Willie must be a gentleman," said Chillis; "for his mother's sake he must be that."

"But how to provide the means to furnish such an education as he ought to have, is what puzzles me," continued Mrs. Smiley, pausing in her needle-work to study that problem more closely, and gazing absently at the face of her guest. "Will ten years more of school-teaching do it, I wonder?"