“And what about the shanty and the cook?” said Peter, his eyes searching Jack’s.

“I’ll go,—­I intended to go all the time if you approved.”

“And what about Ruth?”

“Don’t ask me, Uncle Peter, not now.”  And he hurried off to pack his bag.

CHAPTER XX

If Jack, after leaving Peter and racing for the ferry, had, under Peter’s advice, formulated in his mind any plan by which he could break down Ruth’s resolve to leave both her father and himself in the lurch and go out in the gay world alone, there was one factor which he must have left out of his calculations—­and that was the unexpected.

One expression of Peter’s, however, haunted him all the way home:  —­that Ruth was suffering and that he had been the cause of it.  Had he hurt her?—­and if so, how and when?  With this, the dear girl’s face, with the look of pain on it which Miss Felicia had noticed, rose before him.  Perhaps Peter was right.  He had never thought of Ruth’s side of the matter—­had never realized that she, too, might have suffered.  To-morrow he would go to her.  If he could not win her for himself he could, at least, find out the cause and help relieve her pain.

This idea so possessed him that it was nearly dawn before he dropped to sleep.

With the morning everything changed.

Such a rain had never been known to fall—­not in the memory of the oldest moss-back in the village—­if any such ancient inhabitant existed.  Twelve hours of it had made rivers of the streets, quagmires of the roads, and covered the crossings ankle-deep with mud.  It had begun in the night while Isaac was expounding his views on snuff boxes, tunnels, and Voltaire to Peter and Jack, had followed Jack across the river and had continued to soak into his clothes until he opened Mrs. Hicks’s front door with his private key.  It was still pelting away the next morning, when Jack, alarmed at its fury, bolted his breakfast, and, donning his oilskins and rubber boots, hurried to the brick office from whose front windows he could get a view of the fill, the culvert, and the angry stream, and from whose rear windows could be seen half a mile up the raging torrent, the curve of the unfinished embankment flanking one side of the new boulevard which McGowan was building under a contract with the village.

Hardly had he slipped off his boots and tarpaulins when MacFarlane, in mackintosh and long rubber boots, splashed in: 

“Breen,” said his Chief, loosening the top button of his storm coat and threshing the water from his cap: 

Jack was on his feet in an instant: 

“Yes, sir.”

“I wish you would take a look at the boulevard spillway.  I know McGowan’s work and how he skins it sometimes, and I’m getting worried.  Coggins says the water is backing up, and that the slopes are giving way.  You can see yourself what a lot of water is coming down—­” here they both gazed through the open window.  “I never saw that stream look like that since I’ve been here; there must be a frightful pressure now on McGowan’s retaining walls.  We should have a close shave if anything gave way above us.  Our own culvert’s working all right, but it’s taxed now to its utmost.”