“What is the matter?” he asked.

“Nothing, only I am tired out,” Edgecomb replied, wearily.  “Sometimes I envy you.”

“Don’t,” said Anderson.

“I do.  This friction with new souls and temperaments is wearing my old one thin.  I would rather sell butter and cheese.”

“Rather do anything than desert the battle-field you have chosen, because you are beaten,” said Anderson, with sudden bitterness.

“Nonsense!  You are not beaten.”

“Yes, I am.”

“You have simply taken up new weapons.”

“Weights and balances,” said Anderson, but his laugh was bitter.

He left Edgecomb at the corner, and, going up his own street, reflected again.  He began to wonder if possibly he would not have done better to have stuck to his profession; if he could not have left Banbridge and tried elsewhere—­in the City.  He wondered if he had shown energy and manly ambition, if he had not been poor-spirited.  When he reached home his mother eyed him anxiously and asked if he were ill.

“No,” he said, “but I met Henry, and he looks wretchedly.”

“He hasn’t enough to eat,” Mrs. Anderson said.  “Harriet does not give him enough to eat.  It is a shame.  If I were in his place I would get married.”

“He says he is tired out teaching.  He talks about the friction of so many natures on his.”

“Of course there is a friction,” said Mrs. Anderson, “but he could stand it if he had more to eat.  Let us have a dinner next Sunday night; let us have a roast turkey and a pudding.  We will have lunch at noon.  Henry is very fond of turkey, and it is late enough to get good ones.”

“Shall we ask Harriet?” inquired Anderson, with a lurking mischief.

His mother looked at him with quick suspicion.  “You don’t want her asked?” she said.

“Why should she be asked?  She never is.”

“I don’t know but with an extra dinner—­”

“She has her mission,” Mrs. Anderson said, with firmness.  “You are eating nothing yourself, Randolph.”  Presently she looked at her son with an inscrutable expression.  “Are the Carrolls all gone?” she asked.

Anderson cut himself a bit of beefsteak carefully before replying.  “Some of them, I believe,” said he.

“I heard Mrs. Carroll and her sister and daughter and the boy all went yesterday morning.  Josie Eggleston came in about the Rainy Day Club meeting, this morning, and she told me.”  There was something so interrogative in his mother’s tone that Anderson was obliged to say something.

“They all went except the daughter, I believe,” he said.

“The girl who was here?”

“Yes.”

“Then she didn’t go?”

“She went as far as Lancaster, but she came back?”

“Came back?”

“Yes.  She didn’t want to leave her father alone, and—­under a cloud, as he seems to be, and she knew if she declared she was not going there would be opposition—­that, in fact, her mother would not go.”