One ended by loving him.
On our arrival at the sparse little village I told him of the Dartons. I
had had no news of them for the past four years, and inquiries among the
neighbors left me only the more at sea. Lisbeth they seldom saw, they
said; she never went to church or meetings; and, especially since her
mother, in an unprecedented flare of rebellion, had gone to live with a
married sister in town, she had grown silent and taciturn. As for old
Con Darton, he was going to seed, in spite of the remnants of an earlier
erudition that still clung to him. That is, though he went about
unshaven and in slovenly frayed clothing, he still quoted fluently from
the Bible and Gray's "Elegy." Among the villagers he had come to have
the reputation of a philosopher and an ill-used man. He was poor, it
seemed, so poor that he had abandoned the white farmhouse and had come
to live in a box-like, unpainted shack at the foot of the hill, the new
boarding of which stood out harshly against the unturfed soil. Built
just across the way from a disused mill, near the creek, it had become
known as the "mill house." In spite of this thriftiness, Con always had
money for a new horse, which he would soon trade off for a better;
although these transactions had, of late, become fewer, as Con was
feared as a "shrewd one.
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