“All right,” he said.  “I won’t be longer than I can help.”  He had got the door open and was going to close it again.

His son laughed.  “Better not shut it, father.  It will let the fresh air in.”

“Oh, all right,” said the old man.

The son lingered about, giving some orders to the hired man in the vegetable garden, for an excuse, in the hope that his father might change his mind and ask him to come into the house with him; he felt it so forlorn for him to be going through those lifeless rooms alone.  When he looked round, and saw his father holding the door ajar, as if impatiently waiting for him to be gone, he laughed and waved his hand to him.  “All right, father?  I’m going now.”  But though he treated the matter so lightly with his father, he said grimly to his wife, as he passed her on their own porch, on his way to his once, “I don’t like to think of father being driven out of house and home this way.”

“Neither do I, Dick.  But it can’t be helped, can it?”

“I think I could help it, if I got my hands on that fellow once.”

“No, you couldn’t, Dick.  It’s not he that’s doing it.  It’s Ellen; you know that well enough; and you’ve just got to stand it.”

“Yes, I suppose so,” said Richard Kenton.

“Of course, my heart aches for your poor old father, but so it would if Ellen had some kind of awful sickness.  It is a kind of sickness, and you can’t fight it any more than if she really was sick.”

“No,” said the husband, dejectedly.  “You just slip over there, after a while, Mary, if father’s gone too long, will you?  I don’t like to have him there alone.”

“’Deed and ’deed I won’t, Dick.  He wouldn’t like it at all, my spying round.  Nothing can happen to him, and I believe your mother’s just made an excuse to send him after something, so that he can be in there alone, and realize that the house isn’t home any more.  It will be easier for him to go to Europe when he finds that out.  I believe in my heart that was her idea in not wanting me to find the things for him, and I’m not going to meddle myself.”

With the fatuity of a man in such things, and with the fatuity of age regarding all the things of the past, Kenton had thought in his homesickness of his house as he used to be in it, and had never been able to picture it without the family life.  As he now walked through the empty rooms, and up and down the stairs, his pulse beat low as if in the presence of death.  Everything was as they had left it, when they went out of the house, and it appeared to Kenton that nothing had been touched there since, though when he afterwards reported to his wife that there was not a speck of dust anywhere she knew that Mary had been going through the house, in their absence, not once only, but often, and she felt a pang of grateful jealousy.  He got together the things that Mrs. Kenton had pretended to want, and after glancing in at the different rooms, which seemed to be lying stealthily