Altogether it was one of those nerve-wracking days that come from time to time in the best regulated households, apparently for no other purpose but to prove the fact that a solitary existence is not necessarily the most unhappy.

Mrs. Bartlett, for the first time in her life, was worried about Dave.  He was moody and morose, even to her, his sworn friend and ally, with whom he had never had a word’s difference.  He had gone off that morning shortly after the Squire left the house; and his mother, watching him carefully at breakfast, noticed that he had shoved away his plate with the food untasted.

A fatal symptom to the ever-watchful maternal eye.

Kate felt sulky because her aunt and uncle had been urging her to marry Dave, and apparently Dave had no affection for her beyond that of a cousin, the situation irritating her in the extreme.

“Aunt Louisa, what is the matter with every one?” she said, flouncing into the kitchen.  “Something seems to have jarred the family nerves.  Here is uncle off on some mysterious business, Dave goes off in the snow in a tantrum, and you look as if you had just buried your last friend.”  And the young lady left the room as suddenly as she entered it.

“It does feel as if trouble was brewing,” Mrs. Bartlett admitted to Anna, with a gloomy shake of the head.  “I’m getting that worried about Dave, he’s been away all day, and it’s not usual for him to stay away like this.”  Her voice broke a little, and she left the room hurriedly.

He came in almost immediately, stamping the snow from his boots and looking twice as savage as when he went away.

“Mrs. Bartlett had been worrying about you all day, Mr. David,” Anna said as she turned from the dresser with her arms full of plates.

“And did you care, Anna, that I was not here?” He gave her the appealing glance of a great mastiff who hopes for a friendly pat on the head.

“My feelings on the subject can be of no interest to you,” she answered with chilling decision.

“All right,” and he went to the hat-rack to get his muffler and cap, preparatory to again facing the storm.

The snow had been falling steadily all day.  Drifting almost to the height of the kitchen window, it whirled about the house and beat against the window panes with a muffled sound that was inexpressibly dreary to the girl, who felt herself the center of all this pitiful human contention.

“David, David; where have you been all day, and where are you going now?” His mother looked at his gray, haggard face and tried to guess his hidden trouble, the first he had ever kept from her.

“Mother, I am not a child, and you can’t expect me to hang about the stove like a cat, all my life.”  It was his first harsh word to her and she shrank before it as if it had been a blow.  David, her boy, to speak to her like that!  She turned quickly away to hide the tears, the first she had ever shed on his account.