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VI

On the afternoon before Christmas of that year, the North Station in Boston was filled with hurrying throngs on the way home for the holidays.  Everybody looked tired and excited, but most of them had happy faces, and men and women alike had as many bundles as they could carry; bundles and boxes quite unlike the brown paper ones with which commuters are laden on ordinary days.  These were white packages, beribboned and beflowered and behollied and bemistletoed, to be gently carried and protected from crushing.

The train was filled to overflowing and many stood in the aisles until Latham Junction was reached and the overflow alighted to change cars for Greentown and way stations.

Among the crowd were two men with suit-cases who hurried into the way train and, entering the smoking car from opposite ends, met in the middle of the aisle, dropped their encumbrances, stretched out a hand and ejaculated in the same breath: 

“Dick Larrabee, upon my word!”

“Dave Gilman, by all that’s great!—­Here, let’s turn over a seat for our baggage and sit together.  Going home, I s’pose?”

The men had not met for some years, but each knew something of the other’s circumstances and hoped that the other didn’t know too much.  They scanned each other’s faces, Dick thinking that David looked pinched and pale, David half-heartedly registering the quick impression that Dick was prosperous.

“Yes,” David answered; “I’m going home for a couple of days.  It’s such a confounded journey to that one-horse village that a business man can’t get there but once in a generation!”

“Awful hole!” confirmed Dick.  “Simply awful hole!  I didn’t get it out of my system for years.”

“Married?” asked David.

“No; rather think I’m not the marrying kind, though the fact is I’ve had no time for love affairs—­too busy.  Let’s see, you have a child, haven’t you?”

“Yes; Letty has seen to all that business for me since my wife died.”  (Wild horses couldn’t have dragged the information from him that the “child” was “twins,” and Dick didn’t need it anyway, for he had heard the news the morning he left Beulah.) “Wonder if there have been many changes in the village?”

“Don’t know; there never used to be!  Mrs. Popham has been ailing for years,—­she couldn’t die; and Deacon Todd wouldn’t!” Dick’s old animosities still lingered faintly in his memory, though his laughing voice and the twinkle in his eyes showed plainly that no bitterness was left.  “How’s business with you, David?”

“Only so-so.  I’ve had the devil’s own luck lately.  Can’t get anything that suits me or that pays a decent income.  I formed a new connection the other day, but I can’t say yet what there is in it.  I’m just out of hospital; operation; they cut out the wrong thing first, I believe, sewed me up absent-mindedly, then remembered it was the other thing, and did it over again.  At any rate, that’s the only way I can account for their mewing me up there for two months.”