“Hush, dear,” interrupted her mother.  “Mr. Winslow wouldn’t be interested.”

After considerable urging Jed consented to sit a while in the living-room.  He was less reluctant to talk by this time and, the war creeping into the conversation, as it does into all conversations nowadays, they spoke of recent happenings at home and abroad.  Mrs. Armstrong was surprised to find how well informed her landlord was concerning the world struggle, its causes and its progress.

“Why, no, ma’am,” he said, in answer to a remark of hers; “I ain’t read it up much, as I know of, except in the newspapers.  I ain’t an educated man.  Maybe—­” with his slow smile—­“maybe you’ve guessed as much as that already.”

“I know that you have talked more intelligently on this war than any one else I have heard since I came to this town,” she declared, emphatically.  “Even Captain Hunniwell has never, in my hearing, stated the case against Germany as clearly as you put it just now; and I have heard him talk a good deal.”

Jed was evidently greatly pleased, but he characteristically tried not to show it.  “Well, now, ma’am,” he drawled, “I’m afraid you ain’t been to the post office much mail times.  If you’d just drop in there some evenin’ and hear Gabe Bearse and Bluey Batcheldor raise hob with the Kaiser you’d understand why the confidence of the Allies is unshaken, as the Herald gave out this mornin’.”

A little later he said, reflectively: 

“You know, ma’am, it’s an astonishin’ thing to me, I can’t get over it, my sittin’ here in this house, eatin’ with you folks and talkin’ with you like this.”

Mrs. Armstrong smiled.  “I can’t see anything so very astonishing about it,” she said.

“Can’t you?”

“Certainly not.  Why shouldn’t you do it—­often?  We are landlord and tenant, you and I, but that is no reason, so far as I can see, why we shouldn’t be good neighbors.”

He shook his head.

“I don’t know’s you quite understand, ma’am,” he said.  “It’s your thinkin’ of doin’ it, your askin’ me and—­and WANTIN’ to ask me that seems so kind of odd.  Do you know,” he added, in a burst of confidence, “I don’t suppose that, leavin’ Sam Hunniwell out, another soul has asked me to eat at their house for ten year.  Course I’m far from blamin’ ’em for that, you understand, but—­”

“Wait.  Mr. Winslow, you had tenants in this house before?”

“Yes’m.  Davidson, their names was.”

“And did they never invite you here?”

Jed looked at her, then away, out of the window.  It was a moment or two before he answered.  Then—­

“Mrs. Armstrong,” he said, “you knew, I cal’late, that I was—­er—­ kind of prejudiced against rentin’ anybody this house after the Davidsons left?”

The lady, trying not to smile, nodded.

“Yes,” she replied, “I—­well, I guessed as much.”

“Yes’m, I was.  They would have took it again, I’m pretty sartin, if I’d let ’em, but—­but somehow I couldn’t do it.  No, I couldn’t, and I never meant anybody else should be here.  Seems funny to you, I don’t doubt.”