th a fracture--would have tucked
up her dress, and tied on an apron to help. But no, she sat and preened
herself with the tissue-paper sort of pride of a vain milliner,
or nervously shifted about, lifting up this and that, curiously
supercilious, her tongue rattling on to her husband and to his mother
in a shallow, foolish way. She couldn't say, however, that any thing
was out of order or ill-kept about the place. The old woman's rheumatic
fingers made corners clean, and wood as white as snow, the stove was
polished, the tins were bright, and her own dress, no matter what her
work, neat as a girl's, although the old graceful poise of the body had
twisted out of drawing.

But the real crisis came when Rodney, having stood at the wood-house
door and blown the dinner-horn as he used to do when a boy, the sound
floating and crying away across the rye-field, the old man came--for,
strange to say, that was the one sound he could hear easily, though, as
he said to himself, it seemed as small as a pin, coming from ever so far
away. He came heavily up from the barn-yard, mopping his red face
and forehead, and now and again raising his hand to shade his eyes,
concerned to see the unknown visitors, whose horse and buggy were in the
stable-yard. He and Rodney greeted outside warmly enough, but there was
some trepidation too in Uncle Jim's face--he felt trouble brewing; and
there is no trouble like that which comes between parent and child.
Silent as he was, however, he had a large and cheerful heart, and
nodding his head he laughed the deep, quaint laugh which Rodney himself
of all his sons had--and he was fonder of Rodney than any. He washed his
hands in the little basin outside the wood-house door, combed out his
white beard, rubbed his red, watery eyes, tied a clean handkerchief
round his neck, put on a rusty but clean old coat, and a minute
afterwards was shaking hands for the first time with Rodney's wife. He
had lived much apart from his kind, but he had a mind that fastened upon
a thought and worked it down until it was an axiom. He felt how shallow
was this thin, flaunting woman of flounces and cheap rouge; he saw her
sniff at the brown sugar-she had always had white at the hotel; and he
noted that she let Rodney's mother clear away and wash the dinner things
herself. He felt the little crack of doom before it came.

It came about three o'clock. He did not return to the rye-field after
dinner, but stayed and waited to hear