I
thought I had better be ready for you."

"I wish we were," said the old man, "and we shall be, in the fall, or
the latter part of the summer. But it's better now that we should go--on
Ellen's account."

"Oh, you'll enjoy it," his son evaded him.

"You haven't seen anything of him lately?" Kenton suggested.

"He wasn't likely to let me see anything of him," returned the son.

"No," said the father. "Well!" He rose to put the key into the door, and
his son stepped down from the little porch to the brick walk.

"Mary will have dinner early, father; and when you've got through here,
you'd better come over and lie down a while beforehand."

Kenton had been dropped at eight o'clock from a sleeper on the Great
Three, and had refused breakfast at his son's house, upon the plea that
the porter had given him a Southern cantaloupe and a cup of coffee on
the train, and he was no longer hungry.

"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