ought to be, now. You're perfectly worn out with
that long walk you took." She rose, and beat up the sofa pillows with a
menacing eye upon him.

"Oh, I'm very comfortable here," he said from the depths of his
easy-chair. "Hilbrook won't come to-night. It's past the time."

She glanced at the clock with him, and then desisted. "If he does, I'm
determined to excuse you somehow. You ought never to have gone near him,
Clarence. You've brought it upon yourself."

Ewbert could not deny this, though he did not feel himself so much to
blame for it as she would have liked to make out in her pity of him. He
owned that if he had never gone to see Hilbrook the old man would
probably never have come near them, and that if he had not tried so much
to interest him when he did come Hilbrook would not have stayed so long;
and even in this contrite mind he would not allow that he ought not to
have visited him and ought not to have welcomed him.

III.

The minister had found his parishioner in the old Hilbrook homestead,
which Josiah Hilbrook, while he lived, suffered Ransom Hilbrook to
occupy, and when he died bequeathed to him, with a sufficient income for
all his simple wants. They were cousins, and they had both gone out into
the world about the same time: one had made a success of it, and
remained; and the other had made a failure of it, and come back. They
were both Rixonites, as the families of both had been in the generation
before them. It could be supposed that Josiah Hilbrook, since he had
given the money for a Rixonite church and the perpetual pay of a
Rixonite minister in his native place, had died in the faith; and it
might have been supposed that Ransom Hilbrook, from his constant
attendance upon its services, was living in the same faith. What was
certain was that the survivor lived alone in the family homestead on the
slope of the stony hill overlooking the village. The house was gray with
age, and it crouched low on the ground where it had been built a century
before, and anchored fast by the great central chimney characteristic of
the early New England farmhouse. Below it staggered the trees of an
apple orchard belted in with a stone wall, and beside it sagged the
sheds whose stretch united the gray old house to the gray old barn, and
made it possible for Hilbrook to do his chores in rain or snow without
leaving cover. There was a dooryard defined by a picket fence, and near
the kitchen door was a well with a hi