“It was more my fault than ’twas his,” returned Charlotte; and she shut the door.

“Then I should think you’d be ashamed of yourself,” Sarah called after her, but Charlotte did not seem to hear.

“I never see such work, for my part,” Sarah wailed out to herself.

“Mother, you come in here a minute,” Cephas called out of the bedroom.  He had gone to bed soon after supper.

“Anythin’ new about Barney?” he asked, when his wife stood beside him.

“Barney ain’t no more notion of comin’ back than he had before, in spite of all the talk.  I never see such work,” replied Sarah, in a voice strained high with tears.

“I call it pretty doin’s,” assented Cephas.  His pale face, with its venerable beard, was closely set about with his white nightcap.  He lay staring straight before him with a solemnly reflective air.

“I wish you hadn’t brought up ’lection that time, father,” ventured Sarah, with a piteous sniff.

“If the Democratic party had only lived different, an’ hadn’t eat so much meat, there wouldn’t have been any trouble,” returned Cephas, magisterially.  “If you go far enough, you’ll always get back to that.  A man is what he puts into his mouth.  Meat victuals is at the bottom of democracy.  If there wa’n’t any meat eat there wouldn’t be any Democratic party, an’ there wouldn’t be any wranglin’ in the state.  There’d be one party, jest as there’d ought to be.”

“I wish you hadn’t brought it up, father,” Sarah lamented again; “it’s most killin’ me.”

“If we hadn’t both of us been eatin’ so much animal food there wouldn’t have been any trouble,” repeated Cephas.

“Well, I dunno much about animal food, but I know I’m about discouraged,” said Sarah.  And she went back to the kitchen, and sat down in the rocking-chair and cried a long time, with her apron over her face.  Her heartache was nearly as sore as her daughter’s up-stairs.

Charlotte did not speak to Barney again all summer—­indeed, she scarcely ever saw him.  She had an occasional half-averted glimpse of his figure across the fields, and that was all.  Barney had gone back to the old house to live with his father, and remained there through the summer and fall; but Caleb died in November.  He had never been the same since Deborah’s death; whether, like an old tree whose roots are no longer so firm in the earth that they can withstand every wind of affliction, the shock itself had shaken him to his fall, or the lack of that strange wontedness which takes the place of early love and passion had enfeebled him, no one could tell.  He had seemed to simply stare at life from a sunny place on a stone-wall or a door-step all summer.

When the autumn set in he sat in his old chair by the fire.  Caleb had always felt cold since Deborah died.  When the bell tolled off his years, one morning in November, nobody felt surprised.  People had said to each other for some time that Caleb Thayer was failing.