And here one evening he sat, some few days after his
son's return, while a hubbub of female voices came to him from the next
room. His sister-in-law from three miles down the street, and his married
daughter from ten miles out in the suburbs, had come to show some
civility to the returned traveller, and the conjunction of two such stars
was not to be effected in silence. Nor was silence to be secured even by
a retreat from one room to another.
"Well, pa, you _are_ here, sure enough." A hand pulled aside the curtain
and made the bay-window a part of the parlor again. "Poking off by
yourself, and thinking--I know. When I've told you so many times not to."
It was Jane. It was her office to keep the family from disintegration.
None of them realized it--hardly she herself.
She perched on the arm of his big chair, placed her hand on his forehead,
and looked in his face with a quizzical pretence of impatience. These
little passages sometimes occurred in the bay-window--hardly anywhere
else.
"Well, what is it this time?" she asked. Her intention was
tender, but her voice issued with a kind of explosive grate--the
natural product of vocal cords racked by the lake winds of thirty springs
and wrecked by a thousand sudden and violent transitions from heat to
cold and back again. "Not Mr. Belden, I hope?"
"No, Jennie. That will come out all right, I expect. We had a talk with
the builder about it today."
He looked at her with a kind of wan and patient smile.
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