Bayliss said he guessed he would, though Claude knew there was nothing he hated so much as being out in the cold.  Gladys ran upstairs to put on a warm dress, and Enid accompanied her, leaving Mrs. Farmer to make agreeable conversation between her two incompatible guests.

“Bayliss was just telling us how you lost your hogs in the storm, Claude.  What a pity!” she said sympathetically.

Yes, Claude thought, Bayliss wouldn’t be at all reticent about that incident!

“I suppose there was really no way to save them,” Mrs. Farmer went on in her polite way; her voice was low and round, like her daughter’s, different from the high, tight Western voice.  “So I hope you don’t let yourself worry about it.”

“No, I don’t worry about anything as dead as those hogs were.  What’s the use?” Claude asked boldly.

“That’s right,” murmured Mrs. Farmer, rocking a little in her chair.  “Such things will happen sometimes, and we ought not to take them too hard.  It isn’t as if a person had been hurt, is it?”

Claude shook himself and tried to respond to her cordiality, and to the shabby comfort of her long parlour, so evidently doing its best to be attractive to her friends.  There weren’t four steady legs on any of the stuffed chairs or little folding tables she had brought up from the South, and the heavy gold moulding was half broken away from the oil portrait of her father, the judge.  But she carried her poverty lightly, as Southern people did after the Civil War, and she didn’t fret half so much about her back taxes as her neighbours did.  Claude tried to talk agreeably to her, but he was distracted by the sound of stifled laughter upstairs.  Probably Gladys and Enid were joking about Bayliss’ being there.  How shameless girls were, anyhow!

People came to their front windows to look out as the sleigh dashed jingling up and down the village streets.  When they left town, Bayliss suggested that they drive out past the Trevor place.  The girls began to talk about the two young New Englanders, Trevor and Brewster, who had lived there when Frankfort was still a tough little frontier settlement.  Every one was talking about them now, for a few days ago word had come that one of the partners, Amos Brewster, had dropped dead in his law office in Hartford.  It was thirty years since he and his friend, Bruce Trevor, had tried to be great cattle men in Frankfort county, and had built the house on the round hill east of the town, where they wasted a great deal of money very joyously.  Claude’s father always declared that the amount they squandered in carousing was negligible compared to their losses in commendable industrial endeavour.  The country, Mr. Wheeler said, had never been the same since those boys left it.  He delighted to tell about the time when Trevor and Brewster went into sheep.  They imported a breeding ram from Scotland at a great expense, and when he arrived were so impatient to get the good of him that they turned him in with the ewes as soon as he was out of his crate.  Consequently all the lambs were born at the wrong season; came at the beginning of March, in a blinding blizzard, and the mothers died from exposure.  The gallant Trevor took horse and spurred all over the county, from one little settlement to another, buying up nursing bottles and nipples to feed the orphan lambs.