shaggy coat, and spur him on to his years of trading in
the West, and later in this State. He had a curious epigrammatic way of
talking that I have noticed in a less degree in many Western men: coming
at the marrow and meaning of a scene or person in his narration with a
sheer subtilized common-sense, a tough appreciation of fact beyond
theory, and of its deeper, juster significance, and a dramatic aptness
for expression. Added to all this, my husband's life had been compacted,
crowded with incident; it had saddened and silenced his nature
abnormally; this was the first break: a going back to what he might have
been, such as his children were now.

"I never talked to any one before, Hetty," he said thoughtfully once, as
we were driving along, after a few moments' silence. "I feel as if I had
got breath, this late in the day, that I never expected, for whatever
thought was in me,--and--whatever love."

He turned away his face, crimson at this. He was as strangely reticent
and tender on some points as a woman. So seldom he put his love into
words! That time I remember how the tears suddenly blinded me, when I
heard him, and my fingers grew unsteady, holding the reins. I was so
happy and proud. But I said nothing: he would not have liked it.

Of one time in his life Doctor Manning had never talked to me: of his
earlier youth; when he was married before. He was not a man of whom you
could ask questions; yet I had hinted an inquiry once or twice in his
presence, but only by a change of color and a strange vague restlessness
had he shown that he understood my drift of meaning. Soon after that,
his eldest son, Robert, came to see his father's new wife, and stayed
with us a day or two. He was a short, thickly built young man, with
heavy jaws and black hair and eyes,--keen eyes, I soon felt, that were
weighing and analyzing me as justly, but more shrewdly than ever his
father had done. The night before he went away he came up to the
porch-step where I sat, and said abruptly,--

"I am satisfied, and happy to go now."

"I am glad of that," I said earnestly; for the tenderness of the son to
the father had touched me.

"Yes. You cannot know the dread I had of seeing you. I knew the risk he
ran in laying his happiness in any woman's hands at his hour of life.
But it was hard he never should know a home and love like other
men,"--his voice unsteady, and with an appealing look.

"He never shall need it," I said, quietly.

"Yo