Now he fell upon work as if it had been a veritable dragon of old, which he must slay to rescue his princess.  He toiled from earliest dawn until far dark, and not with hands only.  Still he did not neglect his gratuitous nursing and doctoring.  He saved like a miser, though not at his mother’s and sister’s expense.  He himself would taste, in those days, no butter, no sugar, no fresh meat, no bread of fine flour, but he saw to it that is mother and Elmira were well provided.

When winter came again, he used to hasten secretly along the road, not wishing to meet Lucina for a new reason—­lest she discover how thin his coat was against the wintry blast, how thin his shoes against the snow.

“I never thought Jerome was so close,” Elmira sometimes said to her mother.

“He ain’t close, he’s got an object,” returned Ann, with a shrewd, mysterious look.

“What do you mean, mother?”

“Nothin’.”

Elmira’s and Lawrence’s courtship progressed after the same fashion.  If Doctor Prescott suspected anything he made no sign.  Lawrence was attending patients regularly with his father and reading hard.

Sometimes, during his occasional calls upon Elmira, he saw Jerome.  The two young men, when they met on the road, exchanged covertly cordial courtesies; a sort of non-committal friendship was struck up between them.  Lawrence was the means of introducing Jerome to a new industry, of which he might otherwise never have heard.

“Father and I were on the old Dale road this morning,” he said, “and there is a fine cranberry-meadow there on the left, if anybody wants to improve it.  There’s plenty of chance for drainage from that little stream that runs into Graystone, and it’s sheltered from the frost.  Old Jonathan Hawkins owns it; we went there—­his wife is sick—­and he said he used to sell berries off it, but it had run down.  He said he’d be glad to let somebody work it on shares, just allowing him for the use of the land.  He’s too old to bother with it himself, and he is pretty well straitened for money.  There’s money in it, I guess.”

Jerome listened, and the next day went over to Jonathan Hawkins’s place, on the old Dale road, and made his bargain.  Some of his work on the cranberry-meadow was done before light, his lantern moving about the misty expanse like a marsh candle.  When the berries were ripe he employed children to pick them, John Upham’s among the rest.  He cleared quite a sum by this venture, and added it to his store.  In two years’ time he had saved enough money for his mill, and early in the fall had the lumber all ready.  He had engaged one carpenter from Dale; he thought that he could build the mill himself with his help, and that of some extra hands for raising.

On the evening before the day on which he expected to begin work he went to see Adoniram Judd.  The Judds lived off the main road, in a field connected with it by a cart-path.  Their house, after the commonest village pattern—­a long cottage with two windows on either side of the front door—­stood closely backed up against a wood of pines and larches.  The wind was cold, and the sound of it in the evergreens was like a far-off halloo of winter.  The house had a shadowy effect in waning moonlight, the walls were mostly gray, being only streaked high on the sheltered sides with old white paint.