“Have you been to supper, ma?” asked Nicholas cheerfully.

“Lord, Nick, it’s a long ways past supper-time,” answered Sairy Jane, relieved by the interruption.  “The things air all washed up, ain’t they, pa?”

Amos Burr scowled heavily upon the boy’s head, his phlegmatic nature goaded into resentment by his wife’s ill-temper and the lamentations of Jubal.

“I don’t reckon you expect supper to keep waitin’ till breakfast,” he said.  “You’ve given your ma trouble enough ‘thout makin’ her do an extra washin’ up on your o’count.  You’ve gone clean crazy sence you’ve been loafin’ round with them Battles.  I don’t see as you air much o’count, nohow.”

Nicholas raised his eyes to his father’s face and looked at him fixedly.  For a moment he did not speak, and then he said slowly: 

“I’m as good as a hand to you.”

He was thinking doggedly that he had never hated any one so much as he hated his own father, and that he liked the sensation.  He wished he could do him some real harm—­hit him hard enough to hurt or make the peanuts rot in the ground.  He should like also to choke Jubal, who never left off yelling.

Amos Burr spat a mouthful of tobacco juice through the open window, flinching before the boy’s steady glance.  He was a mild-natured man at best, whose chief sin was his softness.  It would not have entered his slow-witted head to protest against the accusations of his wife.  When they stung him into revolt he revolted in the opposite direction.

But his failures were faults in his son’s eyes.  To the desperate determination of the boy, weakness became as contemptible as crime.  What was a man worth who worked from morning until night and yet achieved nothing?  Of what account was the farmer whom the crows outwitted and the weather made a mockery?  Did not the very crops cry out as they rotted that his father was a fool, and the unploughed land proclaim him a coward?  Had he ever dared a venture in his life or risked a season?  And yet what had ever returned at his bidding or brought forth at his planting?

“You’ve been mighty little use of late,” repeated Amos Burr stubbornly when his wife placed the earthenware bowl on the shelf and came to the table—­her arm outstretched.

“Now, you jes’ take yourself right off, Amos Burr,” she said.  “If you can’t behave decently to my dead sister’s child you shan’t hang round them as was her own flesh and blood kin.  Sairy Jane, you bring that plate of hot corn pones from the stove.  Here, Nick, set right down an’ eat your supper!  There’s some canned cherries if you want ’em.”

Nicholas sat down, but the cornbread stuck in his throat and the coffee was without aroma.  He looked at the figured oilcloth on the table and thought of the shining glass and silver at Juliet Burwell’s.  The flavour of the cake she had given him seemed to intensify his distaste for the food before him.  He felt that he cared for nobody—­that he wanted nothing.  He looked at his stepmother and thought that she was dried and brown like a hickory nut; he looked at Sairy Jane and wondered why she didn’t have any eyelashes, and he looked at Jubal and saw that he was all gums.