The local weather-prophets—the cape-coated Mennonites and the bearded Amishmen, who came into the town to market—had said, with choral unanimity, that the spring would be brief and sudden, and the summer parching and intense. Already, though April had but dawned, the pink arbutus had bloomed and withered, and the pale first violets were peeping, purple and fragrant, among the lush grass of the front yards on Second Street. The annual oriole was a full fortnight ahead of his time in opening his summer-house in the hickory-tree on the Southwarks' lawn; and up in the droning study-room of the high-school, where all the windows were wide to the lazy sunlight, Miss England had begun, this week, to direct the thoughts of her dwindling senior-class toward the subjects of their graduation essays. Swaying with the easy, languid grace of an unstudied young animal, Mary Denbigh, the morning-session ended, turned from the graveled walk before the school-grounds into the little town's chief thoroughfare. Nobody had ever called her pretty, but her light serge skirt had that day been lengthened to her ankles, and Mary was wholly conscious of the new tokens of her growth. Lithe, strong-limbed and firm-bodied, of peasant stock and peasant vigor, youth and health and the open country air were not factors sufficiently unfamiliar to combine in a charm that would attract admiration in her own community. Only a jaded city-gaze—and a well-trained city-gaze at that—would have seen in the blue eyes, the red mouth, the straight nose, pink cheeks, and abundant russet hair, any promise worthy of fulfillment,—could have detected the flower in the bud; and that such a gaze should, on this day of all days, have been leveled in the girl's direction was, perhaps, only one of those grim jests of a Fate that loves to play upon the harmony between man and nature, and that here observed the coming of a human spring that must be brief and sudden, a human summer parching and intense. The usual group of idle residents and idling commercial drummers were sitting at the plate-glass window of the hotel as she went by, but the girl did not see them. Passing among objects of long familiarity, she saw, in fact, nothing until, in a side-street, she heard a rapid step behind her, was covered by an approaching shadow and, half-turning, found someone, a stranger, at her side.
Early that morning, Luke Huber stood before the Pennsylvania Railroad Station at Americus and fancied himself a latter-day crusader setting out to reconquer from the infidels the modern Holy City of God. He had graduated from the Harvard Law-School in the previous June. Now the Republican brother-in-law of one of his classmates, having been elected District-Attorney of corruptly Democratic New York, offered a place on his staff to Luke as soon as Huber should meet successfully the necessary formalities. This new public-prosecutor was to "clean up" the largest city in the country, and Luke, as his assistant, was to aid in restoring to the metropolis the ideals of the framers of the Constitution. A slim young man, with a smooth face too rugged to be handsome, and gray eyes too keen to be always dreaming, Huber stood erect, the wide collar of his woolen overcoat turned up, for the spring lingered that year in the valleys of Virginia, and the brim of his Alpine hat pulled over his nose. He disregarded the group of boys waiting for the "up-train" that would bring the Philadelphia morning newspapers to his native Pennsylvania town, disregarded the grimy station-buildings, and looked toward the river, where the morning mists were lifting and the cold sunshine was creeping through to light the Susquehanna hills.
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