Horace would laugh, and say that he did work.  “I know you do,” Henry would say, grudgingly, “and I suppose maybe a little exercise is good for you; but those fellers from Alford who come over here don’t have to work, and as for Guy Lawson, the boss’s son, he’s a fool!  He couldn’t earn his bread and butter to save his life, except on the road digging like a common laborer.  Playing golf!  Playing!  H’m!” Then was the time for Horace’s fresh cigar.

When Henry came in sight of the cottage where he lived he thought with regret that Horace was not there.  Being in a more pessimistic mood than usual, he wished ardently for somebody to whom he could pour out his heart.  Sylvia was no satisfaction at such a time.  If she echoed him for a while, when she was more than usually worn with her own work, she finally became alarmed, and took refuge in Scripture quotations, and Henry was convinced that she offered up prayer for him afterward, and that enraged him.

He struck into the narrow foot-path leading to the side door, the foot-path which his unwilling and weary feet had helped to trace more definitely for nearly forty years.  The house was a small cottage of the humblest New England type.  It had a little cobbler’s-shop, or what had formerly been a cobbler’s-shop, for an ell.  Besides that, there were three rooms on the ground-floor—­the kitchen, the sitting-room, and a little bedroom which Henry and Sylvia occupied.  Sylvia had cooking-stoves in both the old shop and the kitchen.  The kitchen stove was kept well polished, and seldom used for cooking, except in cold weather.  In warm weather the old shop served as kitchen, and Sylvia, in deference to the high-school teacher, used to set the table in the house.

When Henry neared the house he smelled cooking in the shop.  He also had a glimpse of a snowy table-cloth in the kitchen.  He wondered, with a throb of joy, if possibly Horace might have returned before his vacation was over and Sylvia were setting the table in the other room in his honor.  He opened the door which led directly into the shop.  Sylvia, a pathetic, slim, elderly figure in rusty black, was bending over the stove, frying flapjacks.  “Has he come home?” whispered Henry.

“No, it’s Mr. Meeks.  I asked him to stay to supper.  I told him I would make some flapjacks, and he acted tickled to death.  He doesn’t get a decent thing to eat once in a dog’s age.  Hurry and get washed.  The flapjacks are about done, and I don’t want them to get cold.”

Henry’s face, which had fallen a little when he learned that Horace had not returned, still looked brighter than before.  While Sidney Meeks never let him have the last word, yet he was much better than Sylvia as a safety-valve for pessimism.  Meeks was as pessimistic in his way as Henry, although he handled his pessimism, as he did everything else, with diplomacy, and the other man had a secret conviction that when he seemed to be on the opposite side yet he was in reality pulling with the lawyer.