Love's Way Read Online Free

look out your door or window on to quiet meadows, to serene fells and water, it is distressing to consider that within a year or two the sight will be changed to a hodge-podge of poorly designed modern cottages with not two yards of land between them, those two yards doubtlessly cluttered with noisy youngsters and dogs. He speaks, too, of bringing some “industry” in as an added incentive to lure people to Wingdale. The exact nature of the industry has not been revealed, which is in itself suspicious. If it were some clean, light business, he would not hesitate to name it. My imagination fails to give me any notion what he has in mind, but with mines closeby the ugly spectre of some smoke-belching foundry occasionally looms up.
    None of us at home had a good word to say about his scheme. Neither had Emily, as soon as she learned Edward was against it. She sat with us on a Sunday afternoon out in the garden, where Nora netted (what else?) and I was ostensibly studying Edward’s latest poetical effusion, with a view to criticizing it before submission to Blackwood’s Magazine.
    “I hear the Leroys have sold to Wingdale,” Edward commented idly, with a glance down the road in the direction of Ronald Leroy’s home.
    There was only the Chapman’s farm remaining between Leroy’s and Ambledown. “You cannot mean it!” I exclaimed, dropping his ode to the ground in my consternation. “Why on earth would Ronald do such a thing? He is against the new town.”
    “He has had a terrible run of luck,” Edward reminded me. “You remember how many head of sheep he lost when some poison got into his spring dip. Close to a hundred it was, and then at the end of June the wool he had stored in his barn for market was burned up. He has been scrambling to meet his mortgage ever since. It turned out Wingdale had bought it from the bank, and he foreclosed. Well, Leroy was three months overdue. Wingdale was very gentlemanly about it, they say in town. He has given Ronald a few months to relocate and has even offered to buy his herd from him so that he will have money to get started up in something else.”
    “Where can he go? What will he do? He doesn’t know any other business but sheep,” Nora lamented, when the exigencies of her work allowed her to draw breath.
    “I expect he will go to work for one of the larger farmers. Not much else he can do. I wish I could afford to hire him,” Edward said. Poor Edward. His heart was in the right place, but his head, alas, was in the clouds. He could hardly afford to hire me, at the price of rack and manger.
    Edward looks as a poet should look, with a fine dreamy eye, a sweet expression, and an ineffectual mouth which either smiles or sulks but never assumes the determined line of a man of resolution. He looked to Emily and fell into a reverie, very likely composing a few lines on her beauty. He was not to be disturbed during these moments of creation—it was tacitly understood. I addressed my next remark to Nora.
    “We’ll be the next to go,” I warned her. “I shall go to the bank tomorrow and make sure our mortgage has not been taken over by Wingdale. I doubt it is legal for them to sell it without letting us know.”
    “Wingdale is always legal,” Nora pointed out. “He has hired that London solicitor full time, to represent his interests.”
    “I begin to wonder whether he has not hired an arsonist full time as well. You remember how he got Berkens’ place last winter? A fire started in the barn and spread to the house.”
    “That kind of talk will get you in trouble,” she cautioned me. “Wingdale’s lawyer threatened Berkens with a slander suit when he suggested the fire was not accidental.”
    “It’s not slander if you can prove it. If I were a man I would do some investigating.” I said, speaking rather loudly in Edward’s general direction.
    I did not really hope he would hear. His next speech showed me my error. “You are thinking Beetham had something to do