imes, then she laid the book
down and stood staring out of the window.

"Oh, he was a good man!" she whispered. "He was a good man! If Jimmy
could have had him just two years more! I don't know how to teach him
the things a man ought to know. A boy needs his father.----Oh, my love!
My love----"

Down below, Jim was leaning on the front gate. His chum, Phil Chadwick,
was coming slowly up the street. The boys had not been near Jim since
the funeral. Jim had become a person set apart from their boy world. No
one appreciates the dignity of grief better than a boy, or underneath
his awkwardness has a finer way of showing it. Phil's mother, to his
unspeakable discomfort, had insisted now that he go call on Jim.

Phil, his round face red with embarrassment, approached the gate a
little sidewise.

"Hello, Still!" he said casually.

"Hello, Pilly!" replied Jim, blushing in sympathy.

There was a pause, then said Phil, leaning on the gate, "Diana's got her
pups. One's going to be a bulldog and two of 'em are setters.
U-u-u--want to come over and see 'em and choose yours?"

Jim's face was quivering. It was his father who had persuaded his mother
that Jim ought to have one of Diana's pups. Mrs. Manning felt toward
dogs much as she might have toward hyenas.

"I--I--guess not today, Pilly!"

Another long pause during which the lads swung the gate to and fro and
looked in opposite directions. A locust shrilled from the elm tree.
Finally Phil said:

"Still, you gotta come up to the swimming hole. It'll do you good.
He--he'd a wanted you to--to--to do what you could to cheer up. Come on,
old skinny. Tell your mother. We'll keep away from the other kids. Come
on. You gotta do something or you'll go nutty in your head."

Jim turned and went into the house. His mother forestalled his request.

"If Phil wants you to go swimming, dear, go on. It will do you good.
Don't stay in too long."

Jim and Phil walked up the road to the old Allen place. They climbed the
stile into a field where the aftermath of the clover crop was richly
green and vibrating with the song of cricket and katydid. The path that
the boys followed had been used in turn by Indian and Puritan. The field
still yielded an occasional hide scraper or stone axe.

There was a pine grove at the far edge of the field. In the center of
the grove was the pond that had for centuries been the swimming pool for
boys, Indian and white. Ground pine and "checkerberry" grew