It was three days after the young husband, lying in the grass, his cheek
on his wife's hand, had made his careless prophecy about "whistling,"
that Henry Houghton, jogging along in the sunshine toward Grafton for
the morning mail, slapped a rein down on Lion's fat back, and whistled,
placidly enough.... (But that was before he reached the post office.)
His wife, whose sweet and rosy bulk took up most of the space on the
seat, listened, smiling with content. When he was placid, she was
placid; when he wasn't, which happened now and then, she was an alertly
reasonable woman, defending him from himself, and wrenching from his
hand, with ironic gayety, or rallying seriousness, the dagger of his
discontent with what he called his "failure" in life--which was what
most people called his success--a business career, chosen because the
support of several inescapable blood relations was not compatible with
his own profession of painting. All his training and hope had been
centered upon art. The fact that, after renouncing it, an admirably
managed cotton mill provided bread and butter for sickly sisters and
wasteful brothers, to say nothing of his own modest prosperity, never
made up to him for the career of a struggling and probably unsuccessful
artist--which he might have had. He ran his cotton mill, and supported
all the family undesirables until, gradually, death and marriage took
the various millstones from around his neck; then he retired, as the
saying is--although it was really setting sail again for life--to his
studio (with a farmhouse attached) in the mountains. There had been a
year of passionate work and expectation--but his pictures were dead. "I
sold my birthright for a bale of cotton," he said, briefly.

But he still stayed on the farm, and dreamed in his studio and tried
to teach his little, inartistic Edith to draw, and mourned. As for
business, he said, "Go to the devil!"--except as he looked after Maurice
Curtis's affairs; this because the boy's father had been his friend. But
it was the consciousness of the bartered birthright and the dead
pictures in his studio which kept him from "whistling" very often.
However, on this June morning, plodding along between blossoming fields,
climbing wooded hills, and clattering through dusky covered bridges, he
was not thinking of his pictures; so, naturally enough, he whistled; a
very different whistling from that which Maurice, lying in the grass
beside his wife of fift