BENJAMIN McNEIL MURDOCK
years later he reappeared, evidently with money, modernized the old place, and settled down to an absurd sort of gardening, raising weeds in hot- houses, and generally behaving like a silent and unapproachable eccentric. Within a month of his return he married Ruth Young, a moneyed girl of Centerbrook whom nobody in the Washington Valley knew he had been courting.
And there was nothing remarkable about her past, either. She was the daughter of a Charles Washington Young who had owned the stone-quarry near Wauchock in Murdock's boyhood days. Young and his family had moved to Centerbrook while Murdock was still at the village school, and Ruth and he had been at the public school together, but it was not known that there had been anything between them. Her father had made a great deal of money, first out of ballast stone, then as a rail-road contractor, and finally as a banker and first citizen of the county-seat. He had sent his daughter to Wellesley. His death brought her home to the pretentious Colonial country house which he had built—after the model of Mount Vernon—on the top of the mountain between Centerbrook and the Washington Valley. From there she married, against her mother's wishes. None of her relatives came to see her as Mrs. Murdock. Her husband, it seemed, was not "accepted" in Centerbrook, New Jersey.
Now I ask you, could anything seem more ordi-
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