what Rodney had to say. Rodney did
not tell his little story well, for he foresaw trouble in the old home;
but he had to face this and all coming dilemmas as best he might. With
a kind of shamefacedness, yet with an attempt to carry the thing off
lightly, he told Uncle Jim, while, inside, his wife told the old mother,
that the business of the hotel had gone to pot (he did not say who was
the cause of that), and they were selling out to his partner and coming
to live on the farm.

"I'm tired anyway of the hotel job," said Rodney. "Farming's a better
life. Don't you think so, dad?"

"It's better for me, Rod," answered Uncle Jim, "it's better for me."

Rodney was a little uneasy. "But won't it be better for me?" he asked.

"Mebbe," was the slow answer, "mebbe, mebbe so."

"And then there's mother, she's getting too old for the work, ain't
she?"

"She's done it straight along," answered the old man, "straight along
till now."

"But Millie can help her, and we'll have a hired girl, eh?"

"I dunno, I dunno," was the brooding answer; "the place ain't going to
stand it."

"We'll get more out of it," answered Rodney. "I'll stock it up, I'll put
more under barley. All the thing wants is working, dad. Put more in, get
more out. Now ain't that right?"

The other was looking off towards the rye-field, where, for forty years,
up and down the hillside, he had travelled with the cradle and the
scythe, putting all there was in him into it, and he answered, blinking
along the avenue of the past:

"Mebbe, mebbe!"

Rodney fretted under the old man's vague replies, and said: "But darn it
all, can't you tell us what you think?"

His father did not take his eyes off the rye-field. "I'm thinking," he
answered, in the same old-fashioned way, "that I've been working here
since you were born, Rod. I've blundered along, somehow, just boggling
my way through. I ain't got anything more to say. The farm ain't mine
any more, but I'll keep my scythe sharp and my axe ground just as I
always did, and I'm for workin' as I've always worked as long as I'm let
to stay."

"Good Lord, dad, don't talk that way! Things ain't going to be any
different for you and mother than they are now. Only, of course--" He
paused.

The old man pieced out the sentence: "Only, of course, there can't be
two women rulin' one house, Rod, and you know it as well as I do."

Exactly how Rodney's wife told the old mother of the great change Rodney
never knew; bu