CHAPTER SEVEN.
THE BEAUTY OF ELIZABETH His interview with Evelyn Langham left North with a sense of moral nausea, yet he felt he had somehow failed in his comprehension of her, that she had not meant him to understand her as he had; that, after all, perhaps the significance he had given to her words was of his own imagining.
He waited in his room until she should have time to be well on her way home, then hurried down-stairs.

He was to dine at the Herberts' at seven o'clock, and as their place was but scant two miles from town, he determined to walk.

He crossed the Square, only stopping to speak with the little lamplighter, and twenty minutes later Mount Hope, in the cold breath of the storm, had dwindled to a huddle of faint ghostly lights on the hillside and in the valley.
The Herbert home, a showy country-place in a region of farms, merited a name; but no one except Mrs.Herbert, who in the first flush of possession determined so to dignify it, had ever made use of the name she had chosen after much deliberation.

General Herbert himself called it simply the farm, while to the neighbors and the dwellers in Mount Hope it was known as the general's place, which perhaps sufficiently distinguished it; for its owner was still always spoken of as the general, though since the war he had been governor of his state.
Rather less than half a century before, Daniel Herbert, then a country urchin tending cattle on the hillside where now stood his turreted stone mansion, had decided that some day when he should be rich he would return and buy that hillside and the great reach of flat river-bottom that lay adjacent to it, and there build his home.

His worldly goods at the time of this decision consisted of a pair of jeans trousers, a hickory shirt, and a battered straw hat.