Mrs. Hayn hastily adjusted the spectacles she had been polishing, and as Phil entered the room she threw up both hands in amazement and delight. It was worth the price of a coat, thought Phil to himself, to enable that dear, honest old face to express so much enjoyment. As his mother gazed at him, Phil went through the various poses which had been demanded of him when he was a child--even later--and clothes were being fitted to him by the trustworthy Sarah Tweege; he turned around, presented one side view and the other, walked across the room and back, and saluted his mother with his most profound bow. His mother’s delight knew no bounds. Finally the good old lady took both his hands, held him at arms’ length, looked as if she never could see enough of him; then she gave him a motherly hug, and exclaimed,--
“I should think she’d have fell dead in love with you the minute she clapped her eyes on you, with all those things on.”
Phil retired hastily, and when he removed his dress-coat he savagely shook his fist at it.
Little by little the excitement over Phil’s return abated, being merged in curiosity as to why his father was remaining in the city. Local curiosity was somewhat discouraged, too, by a few sharp retorts to persons who were impertinently inquisitive about the New York developments of Phil’s acquaintance with Lucia. There was no lack of stories, however, regarding the couple: in any part of the civilized world, no matter how stolid the inhabitants, there is imagination enough to replace the absent links in a desired chain of facts. All that Haynton and its vicinity really knew about the supposed Hayn-Tramlay affair was that the Tramlays had been at Hayn Farm, that they had a daughter named Lucia whose age did not differ much from Phil’s, that Phil had been in New York for more than a fortnight, that he had gone direct from Sol Mantring’s sloop to Tramlay’s office, that he had been seen in New York in store-clothes, and that he admitted having seen Lucia once or twice. Out of these few facts, which would have been useless to even a detective were he unable to treat them as mere clues to be followed carefully, the enterprising people of Haynton constructed a number of stories, each of which hung together admirably. That they differed radically from one another was not the fault of the local romancers; they had honestly done their best with the material at hand.
