“Come out in the grove and have a smoke,” said Horace, with a look towards the door through which Sylvia had gone.

Henry nodded.  He gathered up his pipe and tobacco from the table, and the two men sauntered out of the house into the grove.  But even there not much was said.  Both smoked in silence, sitting on the bench, before Horace opened his lips in response to Henry’s inquiry.

“I don’t know what it is, and I don’t know that it is anything, and that is the worst of it,” he said, gloomily; “and I can’t see my way to telling any mortal what little I do know that leads me to fear that it is something, although I would if I were sure and actually knew beyond doubt that there was—­” He stopped abruptly and blew a ring of smoke from his cigar.

“Something is queer about my wife lately,” said Henry, in a low voice.

“What?”

“That’s just it.  I feel something as you do.  It may be nothing at all.  I tell you what, young man, when women talk, as women are intended by an overruling Providence to talk, men know where they are at, but when a woman doesn’t talk men know where they ain’t.”

“In my case there has been so much talk that I seem to be in a fog of it, and can’t see a blessed thing sufficiently straight to know whether it is big enough to bother about or little enough to let alone; but I can’t repeat the talk—­no man could,” said Horace.

“In my case there ain’t talk enough,” said Henry.  “I ain’t in a fog; I’m in pitch darkness.”

Chapter XI

The two men sat for some time out in the grove.  It was very pleasant there.  The air was unusually still, and only the tops of the trees whitened occasionally in a light puff of wind like a sigh.  Now and then a carriage or an automobile passed on the road beyond, but not many of them.  It was not a main thoroughfare.  The calls and quick carols of the birds, punctuated with sharp trills of insects, were almost the only sounds heard.  Now and then Sylvia’s face glanced at them from a house window, but it was quickly withdrawn.  She never liked men to be in close conclave without a woman to superintend, yet she could not have told why.  She had a hazy impression, as she might have had if they had been children, that some mischief was afoot.

“Sitting out there all this time, and smoking, and never seeming to speak a word,” she said to herself, as she returned to her seat beside a front window in the south room and took up her book.  She was reading with a mild and patronizing interest a book in which the heroine did nothing which she would possibly have done under given circumstances, and said nothing which she would have said, and was, moreover, a distinctly different personality from one chapter to another, yet the whole had a charm for the average woman reader.  Henry had flung it aside in contempt.  Sylvia thought it beautiful, possibly for the reason that her own hard sense was