“Not exactly.  My business was of another kind, and probably not very important, at that.  I shall probably be over here again on Monday, Winslow.  Can you see me then?”

Jed rubbed his chin.  “Ye-es,” he said, “I’ll be on private exhibition to my friends all day.  And children half price,” he added, giving Babbie a hug.  “But say, Major, how in the world did you locate me to-day?  How did you know I was over here to Sam’s?  I never told you I was comin’, I’ll swear to that.”

For some reason or other Major Grover seemed just a little embarrassed.

“Why no,” he said, stammering a trifle, “you didn’t tell me, but some one did.  Now, who—­”

“I think I told you, Major,” put in Ruth Armstrong.  “Last evening, when you called to—­to return Charlie’s umbrella.  I told you we were to dine here to-day and that Jed—­Mr. Winslow—­was to dine with us.  Don’t you remember?”

Grover remembered perfectly then, of course.  He hastened to explain that, having borrowed the umbrella of Charles Phillips the previous week, he had dropped in on his next visit to Orham to return it.

Jed grunted.

“Humph!” he said, “you never came to see me last night.  When you was as close aboard as next door seems’s if you might.”

The major laughed.  “Well, you’ll have to admit that I came to-day,” he said.

“Yes,” put in Captain Sam, “and, now you are here, you’re goin’ to stay a spell.  Oh, yes, you are, too.  Uncle Sam don’t need you so hard that he can’t let you have an hour or so off on Thanksgiving Day.  Maud, why in time didn’t we think to have Major Grover here for dinner along with the rest of the folks?  Say, couldn’t you eat a plate of frozen puddin’ right this minute?  We’ve got some on hand that tastes of my grandfather, and we want to get rid of it.”

Their caller laughingly declined the frozen pudding, but he was prevailed upon to remain and hear Miss Hunniwell play.  So Maud played and Charles turned the music for her, and Major Grover listened and talked with Ruth Armstrong in the intervals between selections.  And Jed and Barbara chatted and Captain Sam beamed good humor upon every one.  It was a very pleasant, happy afternoon.  War and suffering and heartache and trouble seemed a long, long way off.

On the way back to the shop in the chill November dusk Grover told Jed a little of what he had called to discuss with him.  If Jed’s mind had been of the super-critical type it might have deemed the subject of scarcely sufficient importance to warrant the major’s pursuing him to the Hunniwells’.  It was simply the subject of Phineas Babbitt and the latter’s anti-war utterances and surmised disloyalty.

“You see,” explained Grover, “some one evidently has reported the old chap to the authorities as a suspicious person.  The government, I imagine, isn’t keen on sending a special investigator down here, so they have asked me to look into the matter.  I don’t know much about Babbitt, but I thought you might.  Is he disloyal, do you think?”