"Little ones all in bed, of course?"
"Indeed, they would have lain awake half the night—those naughty boys—talking of Longfield. You never saw children so delighted."
"Are they?" I thought the tone was rather sad, and that the father sat listening with less interest than usual to the pleasant little household chronicle, always wonderful and always new, which it was his custom to ask for and have, night after night, when he came home,—saying it was to him, after his day's toil, like a "babbling o' green fields." Soon it stopped.
"John dear, you are very tired?"
"Rather."
"Have you been very busy all day?"
"Very busy."
I understood, almost as well as his wife did, what those brief answers indicated; so, stealing away to the table where Guy's blurred copy-book and Edwin's astonishing addition sums were greatly in need of Uncle Phineas, I left the fire-side corner to those two. Soon John settled himself in my easy chair, and then one saw how very weary he was—weary in body and soul alike—weary as we seldom beheld him. It went to my heart to watch the listless stretch of his large, strong frame—the sharp lines about his mouth—lines which ought not to have come there in his two-and-thirty years. And his eyes—they hardly looked like John's eyes, as they gazed in a sort of dull quietude, too anxious to be dreamy, into the red coals—and nowhere else.
At last he roused himself, and took up his wife's work.
"More little coats! Love, you are always sewing."