nder her black
hat. "What is the matter?" she asked.

Sylvia patted her on the shoulder. "Nothing is the matter," said she.
"Run along and have a good time, but you had better be home by five
o'clock. There is a praise meeting to-night, and I guess we'll all
want to go, and I am going to have supper early."

After Rose had gone and Sylvia had left the room, the two men looked
at each other. Horace was ashy pale. Henry's face showed alarm and
astonishment. "What is it?" he whispered.

"Come out in the grove and have a smoke," said Horace, with a look
towards the door through which Sylvia had gone.

Henry nodded. He gathered up his pipe and tobacco from the table, and
the two men sauntered out of the house into the grove. But even there
not much was said. Both smoked in silence, sitting on the bench,
before Horace opened his lips in response to Henry's inquiry.

"I don't know what it is, and I don't know that it is anything, and
that is the worst of it," he said, gloomily; "and I can't see my way
to telling any mortal what little I do know that leads me to fear
that it is something, although I would if I were sure and actually
knew beyond doubt that there was--" He stopped abruptly and blew a
ring of smoke from his cigar.

"Something is queer about my wife lately," said Henry, in a low voice.

"What?"

"That's just it. I feel something as you do. It may be nothing at
all. I tell you what, young man, when women talk, as women are
intended by an overruling Providence to talk, men know where they are
at, but when a woman doesn't talk men know where they ain't."

"In my case there has been so much talk that I seem to be in a fog of
it, and can't see a blessed thing sufficiently straight to know
whether it is big enough to bother about or little enough to let
alone; but I can't repeat the talk--no man could," said Horace.

"In my case there ain't talk enough," said Henry. "I ain't in a fog;
I'm in pitch darkness."

Chapter XI

The two men sat for some time out in the grove. It was very pleasant
there. The air was unusually still, and only the tops of the trees
whitened occasionally in a light puff of wind like a sigh. Now and
then a carriage or an automobile passed on the road beyond, but not
many of them. It was not a main thoroughfare. The calls and quick
carols of the birds, punctuated with sharp trills of insects, were
almost the only sounds heard. Now and then Sylvia's face glanced at
them from a hou