their son's bravery in keeping to his own way
and choice. The two farms joined. Marilla and her mother were their
next neighbors; the mother had since died.

"Father," exclaimed William Haydon suddenly, as they neared the barn,
"I do' know now but I've thought o' the very one!"

"What d'ye mean?" said the old man, startled a little by such
vehemence.

"'T ain't nobody I feel sure of getting," explained the son, his ardor
suddenly cooling. "I had Maria Durrant in my mind--Marilla's cousin.
Don't you know, she come and stopped with us six weeks that time
Marilla was so dyin' sick and we hadn't been able to get proper help;
and what a providence Maria Durrant was! Mother said one day that she
never saw so capable a woman."

"I don't stand in need of nursin'," said the old man, grumbling, and
taking a defensive attitude of mind. "What's the use, anyway, if you
can't get her? I'll contrive to get along somehow. I always have."

William flushed quickly, but made no answer, out of regard to the old
man's bereaved and wounded state. He always felt like a schoolboy in
his father's presence, though he had for many years been a leader in
neighborhood matters, and was at that moment a selectman of the town
of Atfield. If he had answered back and entered upon a lively argument
it probably would have done the old man good; anything would have
seemed better than the dull hunger in his heart, the impossibility of
forming new habits of life, which made a wall about his very thoughts.

After a surly silence, when the son was needlessly repentant and the
father's face grew cloudy with disapproval, the two men parted.
William had made arrangements to stay all the afternoon, but he now
found an excuse for going to the village, and drove away down the
lane. He had not turned into the highroad before he wished himself
back again, while Israel Haydon looked after him reproachfully, more
lonely than ever, in the sense that something had come between them,
though he could not tell exactly what. The spring fields lay broad and
green in the sunshine; there was a cheerful sound of frogs in the
lower meadow.

"Poor mother! how she did love early weather like this!" he said, half
aloud. "She'd been getting out to the door twenty times a day, just to
have a look. An' how she'd laugh to hear the frogs again! Oh, poor me!
poor me!" For the first time he found himself in tears. The grim old
man leaned on the fence, and tried to keep back the sob