Meanwhile, a thing she did not know of was happening on the other side of the house in that same old-fashioned garden. Mr. Bodger, accompanied by Mr. Stalls and Mr. Wilkins, had arrived from Bunker’s Mills to interview the new arrival in the county, whose latitude in administering corporal punishment had aroused the indignation of every humane heart that had been made acquainted with the station master’s story. Mr. Bodger saw the departure of the weeping woman of elderly aspect, he heard her wails, and he saw their cause in a strange young man. This was all the evidence that he wanted. Mr. Bodger made no inquiries into identity or relationship. He weighed two hundred and twenty pounds, he had three men behind him, and he fell upon Mr. Hackfeather as the cyclone falls upon the chicken-coop. * * * * * The consequences of these two meetings were so far-reaching, extending to warrants of arrest, counter charges, civil suits and much civiler compromises, that it was July before the ladies of the Bodger and Hackfeather families picked up their threads of social intercourse, which were knotted only at one point. To both of them it occurred on a fine Summer’s day to call on the new comers at the old bungalow by way of seeing whether the innocent causes of so much dire mischief knew anything about the agitation they had caused. [Illustration] As the train from Bunker’s Mills met the boat from Ellenville, Mr. Bodger’s wife and Mr. Hackfeather’s mother arrived at the same time, and, sitting in the sunny reception room of the bungalow, glared at each other in chilly and silent hostility, while poor, innocent little Mrs. Wick, much troubled by their strange behavior, tried to talk to both of them at once, and rattled away in her embarrassment until she had talked a great deal more than she had meant to. She told them all the story of Beatrice Brighton Wick, and the will, and the hurried flight to Jericho, and at their surprise at finding Jericho Pond with its Summer and Winter colony so delightful a place that they hardly felt as if they could tear themselves away from it when the four years were up. And she told them that both she and Mr. Wick had thought it might be quite awkward for so newly married a couple to be traveling with a six month’s old baby, and that baby Mr. Wick’s aunt. [Illustration] “But, do you know,” she said, “we must have been over-sensitive about it, for we never had the first least little bit of trouble. Indeed, the only mishap we had was the other way. The old woman who was in charge of the place here left us suddenly the first day without a word of warning. I couldn’t make out why she was dissatisfied, but my nurse, Nora, told me that she thought that Miss Hipsy thought that the baby was too young. Some people have such an objection to young babies, you know. However, it didn’t the least bit matter, for Nora turned out to be a very good cook, and I took the baby. I wanted to learn, you know.”