Ardea let her horse pick his way down to the wood road, and when they were approaching the Deer Trace gate:  “You haven’t promised yet, Tom; and you must, you know.”

“Not to see Nan?  That’s easy.  I’ll keep out of her way, if you can keep her out of mine.  All I care is to know that she is comfortably provided for.”

This he said, thinking only of the boy-time obligation voluntarily assumed; but it was quite inevitable that Ardea should mistake the motive.

“It is right and proper that you should care about that,” she said judicially.  And a little farther along she added:  “But I don’t like your attitude.”

“I don’t like it myself,” he rejoined heartily.  “I never wanted so badly to say things in all my life!  But you’ve nailed the lid on and I can’t.”

“They are better unsaid,” she returned quickly.  “Will you take that for your cue in the future?”

“Certainly; it is for you to command,” he said lightly, swinging from his saddle to open the pasture gate for her; and so the morning ride came to its end.

Since provincialism is by no means the exclusive distinction of the landward bred, there was an immediate restirring of the gossip pool when the story of Tom’s befriending of Nancy Bryerson and her child got abroad in Gordonia and among the country colonists.

In the comment of the simpler-minded Gordonia folk, the iron-master’s son had finally “made it up” with Nancy, and here the note of approval was not wholly lacking.  There were good-hearted souls to say that boys will be boys, and to express the hope that Tom would go on from this beginning and make an honest woman of Nancy by marrying her.

Quite naturally, the point of view of the country-house people was different; more critical, if not less charitable.  Though the social acceptance of the Gordons, as an ancient family, as friends of the Dabneys, and as land-holding neighbors was fairly complete, it still lacked somewhat of the class kinship which breeds leniency and the closed eye to the sins of its own household.  But for Tom, personally, as a distinct social improvement on honest Caleb, the welcome into the charmed circle of Mountain View Avenue had been warm enough to make his sudden apparent relapse into the primitive figure as an affront to the colony.  Hence, there were rods laid in pickle for the sinner, as when Mrs. Vancourt Henniker gave the footman at Rook Hill a hint that for the present the Misses Henniker were not at home to Mr. Thomas Gordon; and if Tom had known it, there were other and similar chastenings lying in wait for him behind more of the colonial doors.

But Tom did not know it.  He was in the crucial month of the panic year, striving desperately to maintain the foothold given to him by the pipe-casting invention, and he had little time for the amenities.  So it came about that he escaped for the moment; or, which was quite the same, he did not know he was pursued.  Another Northern city, with its full complement of grafting officials, was in the market for some train-loads of water-mains, and again Thomas Jefferson was fighting the old battle of conscience against expediency, this time in the evil-smelling ditches where the dead and wounded lie.