Polonius has it, truly it was "the very ecstasy of love."






CHAPTER II





"A dancing shape, an image gay, To haunt, to startle, and waylay."

The town of Oakdale is at the present time a flourishing place,
inhabited principally by "suburbanites," for it lies not very far
from New York; but the Reverend Austin Davis, who was the spiritual
guardian of most of them, had come to Oakdale some twenty and more
years ago, when it was only a little village, with a struggling
church which it was the task of the young clergyman to keep alive.
Perhaps the growth of the town had as much to do with his success as
his own efforts; but however that might have been he had received
his temporal reward some ten years later, in the shape of a fine
stone church, with a little parsonage beside it. He had lived there
ever since, alone with his one child,--for just after coming to
Oakdale he had married a daughter of one of the wealthy families of
the neighborhood, and been left a widower a year or two later.

A more unromantic and thoroughly busy man than Mr. Davis at the age