When spring came again and released grass, birds, trees, souls, flowers, the very air from the gyves of winter, she was so much more a prisoner that she herself pleaded to be taken back to Tuliptree Farm. If she could not meet people she did not want to see them pass her windows, or hear them laugh as they went by in shadows of evening time. On the farm she could wander about the yard unterrified and, with increasing heaviness, devote herself to the flowerbeds. She fled at the sight of any passerby and was altogether as hidden and craven as only a properly bred American wife undergoing the shameful glory of motherhood could be. She was smitten at times with panics of fear. She knew that she would perish and she called her husband to save her from dying so young; yet when he got her in his arms to comfort her, she called him her murderer. She accused him of dragging her into the hasty marriage, and reminded him that if he had not inflicted his ring and his name and his burden upon her she could have gone with her father and mother this summer to Ballston Spa, where there was life and music, where the waltz flourished in rivalry with the vivacious polka just imported. But even in her most insane onsets she did not taunt him now with the name of Harry Chalender. That was a comfort. One day Chalender drove up to the house, but she would not see him. Which gave RoBards singular pleasure. Chalender lingered, hoping no doubt that she would relent. He sat out an hour, drinking too much brandy, and cursing New York because it laughed at his insane talk of going forty miles into the country to fetch a river into the city. Chalender wanted to pick up the far-off Croton and carry it on a bridge across the Spuyten Duyvil! When he had left, Patty, who had overheard his every sentence, said: “He must be going mad.” She was absent in thought a while, then murmured as if from far off: “I wonder if he is drinking himself to death on purpose, and why?” CHAPTER V All summer the water-battle went on in town, but with flagging interest. Colonel DeWitt Clinton threw his powerful influence into the plan for an open canal from a dam in the Croton down to a reservoir to be built on Murray’s Hill. Even Clinton’s fervor left the people cold. When he pointed out that they were paying hundreds of thousands of dollars every year for bad water hauled in hogsheads, they retorted that the Croton insanity would cost millions. When he pointed out that the Croton would pour twenty million gallons of pure water every day into the city, and declared that New York water was not fit to drink, the answer came gaily that it did not need to be, since the plainest boarding house kept brandy bottles on the table.