orace's fresh cigar.

When Henry came in sight of the cottage where he lived he thought
with regret that Horace was not there. Being in a more pessimistic
mood than usual, he wished ardently for somebody to whom he could
pour out his heart. Sylvia was no satisfaction at such a time. If she
echoed him for a while, when she was more than usually worn with her
own work, she finally became alarmed, and took refuge in Scripture
quotations, and Henry was convinced that she offered up prayer for
him afterward, and that enraged him.

He struck into the narrow foot-path leading to the side door, the
foot-path which his unwilling and weary feet had helped to trace more
definitely for nearly forty years. The house was a small cottage of
the humblest New England type. It had a little cobbler's-shop, or
what had formerly been a cobbler's-shop, for an ell. Besides that,
there were three rooms on the ground-floor--the kitchen, the
sitting-room, and a little bedroom which Henry and Sylvia occupied.
Sylvia had cooking-stoves in both the old shop and the kitchen. The
kitchen stove was kept well polished, and seldom used for cooking,
except in cold weather. In warm weather the old shop served as
kitchen, and Sylvia, in deference to the high-school teacher, used to
set the table in the house.

When Henry neared the house he smelled cooking in the shop. He also
had a glimpse of a snowy table-cloth in the kitchen. He wondered,
with a throb of joy, if possibly Horace might have returned before
his vacation was over and Sylvia were setting the table in the other
room in his honor. He opened the door which led directly into the
shop. Sylvia, a pathetic, slim, elderly figure in rusty black, was
bending over the stove, frying flapjacks. "Has he come home?"
whispered Henry.

"No, it's Mr. Meeks. I asked him to stay to supper. I told him I
would make some flapjacks, and he acted tickled to death. He doesn't
get a decent thing to eat once in a dog's age. Hurry and get washed.
The flapjacks are about done, and I don't want them to get cold."

Henry's face, which had fallen a little when he learned that Horace
had not returned, still looked brighter than before. While Sidney
Meeks never let him have the last word, yet he was much better than
Sylvia as a safety-valve for pessimism. Meeks was as pessimistic in
his way as Henry, although he handled his pessimism, as he did
everything else, with diplomacy, and the other man had a secret
conviction