"Oh, yes," said Lydia, "I'm all right. Only I'm kinder sleepy. I guess this air makes me. It's higher up here than 'tis a few miles back."
"Yes," said Eben, "we've been kinder climbin' up for some days. Well, you go an' sleep it off. Do you good. I'll have my pipe, an' then I'll mog round an' see 'f I can't work off a few bottles on the unsuspectin' populace."
When Eben came home from his successful sales, he found a changeling. His wife was not so different in looks or words as in a subtle something he could not define. She laughed at his jokes, and even, in a gentle way, ventured pleasantries of her own; but a strange languor hung about her. It might have been called patience, an acceptance of a situation rather than her eager cheer in it.
"You tired?" he asked her over and over again that day, and she always answered:—
"Mebbe I am, a mite."
So they settled down in the little tavern, and while Eben took excursions round about to place his "trade," she stayed behind, and either shut herself upstairs or sat meditatively in the garden. What moved her now was an overwhelming curiosity. She wondered what the first wife had been like, whether she could make doughnuts, and, above all, if she had been pretty. Sometimes she remembered, with a wild impulse to tell him because it seemed so desperately funny to her, the unhappy couple that had formed a part of her childhood's memories, who used to quarrel violently whenever the husband drank too much, and his wife, in his helplessness, used to go through his pockets.
"Anybody can bear 'most anything," he used to declare, as he steadied himself by the gate, in drunken majesty, and addressed the school-children in a ring, "but goin' through anybody's pockets. That's more'n anybody ought to be called upon to bear."
Lydia smiled sorrowfully upon herself in the midst of her daze, at the wonder whether she also should be tempted to go through her husband's pockets, not thriftily, to save his purse, but to discover the portrait of his first wife. Yet she had resolved to ask him nothing; and then, in the way of womankind, she opened her lips one day and said the thing she would not.
They were sitting in the garden under the pear tree, with beautiful old borders, all a lovely neglect, on both sides. Lydia had been talking about flowers, and getting up now and then to pull a weed,—an ineffectual service where weeds were so plentiful,—and stopping to speak a word to a late sweet-william, as if it were a child. Eben was smoking his pipe contentedly and watching her.
"You like 'em, don't you?" he said fondly, as she came back and took her chair again.