What a strange prescience, in some respects, has the devoted and
watchful heart that loves! William Hinkley, had seen but for a
single instant, the face of that young traveller, who has already
been introduced to us, and that instant was enough to awaken his
dislike--nay, more, his hostility. Yet no villager in Charlemont
but would have told you, that, of all the village, William Hinkley
was the most gentle, the most generous--the very last to be moved
by bad passions, by jealousy or hate.
The youth whom we have seen going down with his uncle to the great
valley of the Mississippi, was now upon his return. He was now
unaccompanied by the benignant senior with whom we first made his
acquaintance. He had simply attended the old bachelor, from whom
he had considerable expectations, to his plantation, in requital
of the spring visit which the latter had paid to his relatives in
Kentucky; and having spent the summer in the southwest, was about
to resume his residence, and the profession of the law, in that
state. We have seen that, however he might have succeeded in
disguising his true feelings from his uncle, he was not unmoved by
the encounter with Margaret Cooper, on the edge of the village.
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