“Any letters?”

“Not a letter.”

“Sho!”

Farmer Hayn and his wife would have made good actors, if tested by their ability to clothe a few words with pantomime of much variety and duration. From almost the time that her husband started to the post-office, Mrs. Hayn had been going out on the veranda to look for him returning. She had readjusted her afternoon cap several times, as she would have done had she expected a visitor; she had picked faded buds from some late roses, had examined the base of one of the piazza posts to be sure that the old wistaria vine was not dragging it from its place, and had picked some bits of paper from the little grass-plot in front of the house; but each time she went from one duty to another she shaded her eyes and looked down the road over which her husband would return. She had eyes for everything outside the house,—an indication of rot at an end of one of the window-sills, a daring cocoon between two slats of a window-blind, a missing screw of the door-knob,—all trifles that had been as they were for weeks, but had failed to attract her attention until expectation had sharpened her eyesight. As time wore on, she went into the house for her spectacles; generally she preferred to have letters read to her by her husband, but her absent son’s writing she must see with her own eyes. Then she polished the glasses again and again, trying them each time by gazing down the road for the bearer of the expected letter. Calmness, in its outward manifestation, was noticeable only after her hope had again been deferred.

As for the old man, who was quite as disappointed as his wife, he studied a partly-loosened vest-button as if it had been an object of extreme value; then he sat down on the steps of the veranda, studied all visible sections of the sky for a minute or two, and finally ventured the opinion that a middling lively shower might come due about midnight. Then he told his wife of having met the minister, who had not said anything in particular, and of a coming auction-sale of which he had heard, and how eggs for shipment to the city had “looked up” three cents per dozen. Then he sharpened his pocket-knife on his boot-leg, handling it as delicately and trying its edge as cautiously as if it were an instrument of which great things were expected. Then both joined in estimating the probable cost of raising the youngest calf on the farm to its full bovine estate.

Finally, both having thoroughly repressed and denied and repulsed themselves, merely because they had been taught in youth that uncomfortable restraint was a precious privilege and a sacred duty, Mrs. Hayn broke the silence by exclaiming,—

“It does beat all.”

“What does?” asked her husband, as solicitously as if he had not the slightest idea of what was absorbing his wife’s thoughts.

“Why, that Phil don’t write. Here’s everybody in town tormentin’ me to know when he’s comin’ back, an’ if he’s got the things they asked him to buy for ’em, an’ not a solitary word can I say; we don’t even know how to send a letter to him to stir him up an’ remind him that he’s got parents.”

“Well, ther’s sure to be a letter somewheres on the way, I don’t doubt, tellin’ us all we want to know,” said the old man, going through the motions of budding an althea-bush, in the angle of the step, from a scion of its own stock. “‘Watched pots never bile,’ you know, an’ ’tain’t often one gets a letter till he stops lookin’ for it.”

“But ’tain’t a bit like Phil,” said the old lady. “Why, he’s been away more’n a week. I thought he’d at least let us know which of the big preachers he heerd on Sunday, an’ what he thought of ’em. Hearin’ them big guns of the pulpit was always one of the things he wanted to go to the city for. Then there’s the bread-pan I’ve been wantin’ for ten years,—one that’s got tin enough to it not to rust through every time there comes a spell of damp weather: he might at least rest my mind for me by lettin’ me know he’d got it.”

“All in good time, old lady; let’s be patient, an’ we’ll hear all we’re waitin’ for. Worry’s more weary in’ than work. Rome wasn’t built in a day, you know.”

“For mercy’s sake, Reuben, what’s Rome got to do with our Phil? I don’t see that Rome’s got anythin’ to do with the case, onless it’s somethin’ like New York, where our boy is.”

“Well, Rome was built an’ rebuilt a good many times, you see, ’fore it got to be all that was ’xpected of it: an’ our Phil’s goin’ through the same operation, mebbe. A man’s got to be either a stupid savage or a finished-off saint to be suddenly pitched from fields and woods into a great big town without bein’ dazed. When I first went down to York, my eyes was kept so wide open that I couldn’t scarcely open my mouth for a few days, much less take my pen in hand, as folks say in letters. I hardly knowed which foot I was standin’ on, an’ sometimes I felt as if the ground was gone from under me. Yet New York ground is harder than an onbeliever’s heart.”

Mrs. Hayn seemed to accept the simile of Rome’s building as applied to her son, for she made no further objection to it; she continued, however, to polish her glasses, in anticipation of what she still longed to do with them. Her husband continued to make tiny slits and cross-cuts in the althea’s bark, and to insert buds carefully cut from the boughs. Finally he remarked, as carelessly as if talking about the weather,—

“Sol Mantring’s sloop’s got back.”

“Gracious!” exclaimed Mrs. Hayn; “why ain’t you told me so before? Sol’s seen Phil, ain’t he? What does he say? Of course you didn’t come home without seein’ him?”

“Of course I didn’t. Yes, Sol’s seen Phil,—seen him the day before he caught the tide an’ came out. An’ Sol says he’s a stunner, too,—don’t look no more like his old self than if he’d been born an’ raised in York. I tell you, Lou Ann, it don’t take that boy much time to catch on to whatever’s got go to it. Why, Sol says he’s got store-clothes on, from head to foot. That ain’t all, either; he——” Here the old man burst into laughter, which he had great difficulty in suppressing; after long effort, however, he continued: “Sol says he carries a cane,—a cane not much thicker than a ramrod. Just imagine our Phil swingin’ a cane if you can!” And the old man resumed his laughter, and gave it free course.

“Mercy sakes!” said the old lady; “I hope he didn’t take it to church with him. An’ I hope he won’t bring it back here. What’ll the other members of the Young People’s Bible-Class say to see such goin’s-on by one that’s always been so proper?”

“Why, let him bring it: what’s a cane got to do with Bible-classes? I don’t doubt some of the ’postles carried canes; I think I’ve seed ’em in pictures in the Illustrated Family Bible. I s’pose down in Judee ther’ was snakes an’ dogs that a man had to take a clip at with a stick, once in a while, same as in other countries.”

“What else did Sol say?” asked the mother.

“Well, he didn’t bring no special news. He said Phil didn’t know he was leavin’ so soon, else like enough he’d have sent some word. He said Phil was lookin’ well, an’ had a walk on him like a sojer in a picture. I’m glad the boy’s got a chance to get the plough-handle stoop out of his shoulders for a few days. Sez you wouldn’t know his face, though, ’cause his hair’s cut so short; got a new watch-chain, too; I’m glad to hear that, ’cause I was particular to tell him to do it.”

“Well, I half wish Sol Mantring’s sloop had stayed down to York, if that’s all the news it could bring,” said Mrs. Hayn, replacing her spectacles in their tin case, which she closed with a decided snap. “Such a little speck of news is only aggravatin’: that’s what ’tis.”

“Small favors thankfully received, old lady, as the advertisements sometimes say. Oh, there was one thing more Sol said: ’twas that he reckoned Phil was dead gone on that Tramlay gal.”

Mrs. Hayn received this information in silence; her husband began to throw his open knife at a leaf on one of the veranda steps.

“I don’t see how Sol Mantring was to know anything like that,” said Mrs. Hayn, after a short silence. “He isn’t the kind that our Phil would go an’ unbosom to, if he had any such thing to tell, which it ain’t certain he had.”

“Young men don’t always have to tell such things, to make ’em known,” suggested the farmer. “Pooty much everybody knowed when I was fust gone on you, though I didn’t say nothin’ to nobody, not even to the gal herself.”

“If it’s so,” said Mrs. Hayn, after another short pause, “mebbe it explains why he hain’t writ. He’d want to tell us ’fore anybody else, an’ he feels kind o’ bashful like.”

“You’ve got a good mem’ry, Lou Ann,” said the old farmer, rising, and pinching his wife’s ear.

“What do you mean, Reuben?”

“Oh, nothin’, ’xcept that you hain’t forgot the symptoms,—that’s all.”

“Sho!” exclaimed the old lady, giving her husband a push, though not so far but that she was leaning on his shoulder a moment later. “‘Twould be kind o’ funny if that thing was to work, though, wouldn’t it?” she continued; “that is, if Sol’s right.”

“Well,” replied her husband, with a sudden accession of earnestness in his voice, “if Sol’s right, ’twon’t be a bit funny if it don’t work. I hope the blessed boy’s got as much good stuff in him as I’ve always counted on. The bigger the heart, the wuss it hurts when it gets hit; an’ there’s a mighty big heart in any child of you an’ me, though I say it as mebbe I shouldn’t.”

“That boy ain’t never goin’ to have no heart-aches,—not on account o’ gals,” said the mother, whose voice also showed a sudden increase of earnestness. “I don’t b’lieve the gal was ever made that could say no to a splendid young feller like that,—a young feller that’s han’some an’ good an’ bright an’ full o’ fun, an’ that can tell more with his eyes in a minute than a hull sittin’-room-full of ord’nary young men can say with their tongues in a week.”

“No,” said the old man, soberly, “not if the gal stayed true to the pattern she was made on,—like you did, for instance. But gals is only human,—ther’ wouldn’t be no way of keepin’ ’em on earth if they wasn’t, you know,—an’ sometimes they don’t do ’xactly what might be expected of ’em.”

“That Tramlay gal won’t give him the mitten, anyhow,” persisted Mrs. Hayn. “Mebbe she ain’t as smart as some, but that family, through an’ through, has got sense enough to know what’s worth havin’ when they see it. She needn’t ever expect to come back here to board for the summer, if she cuts up any such foolish dido as that.”

“Lou Ann,” said the farmer, solemnly, “do you reely think it over an’ above likely that she’d want to come back, in such case made an’ pervided?”

Then both old people laughed, and went into the house, and talked of all sorts of things that bore no relation whatever to youth or love or New York. They retired early, after the manner of farm-people in general, after a prayer containing a formal and somewhat indefinite petition for the absent one. The old lady lay awake for hours, it seemed to her, her head as full of rosy dreams as if it were not covered with snow; yet when at last she was dropping asleep she was startled by hearing her husband whisper,—

“Father in heaven, have pity on my poor boy.”