"It isn't that; the work never troubles him. He looks far ahead and seems to know, like a wizard, long before the event just what is going to be successful and what a failure. I think I know him better than anybody in the world, but I can't fathom him just now. Something is worrying him, and he tries hard not to let it worry him and not to show that it does. Partly he is successful, for I cannot guess the trouble; but that there is a trouble he fails to hide. I must find it out and take my share. Sometimes I think——"
She broke off abruptly.
"What? Nothing that involves me? We're the best, truest friends now, thank heaven."
"No, no. Time will reveal it."
For a moment or two they were silent with their thoughts. It struck neither that such a conversation was peculiar; it occurred to neither the man nor the woman that in the very fact of their friendship—of a friendship so close that the wife could thus discuss her husband's trouble—there existed the seed of that trouble.
Christopher mused upon the problem, and honestly marvelled before it.
"I suppose nobody can be happy really, and he's no exception to the rule. Yet, looking at his life, I should account him quite the luckiest man I ever heard of. Consider the perfection that he has crammed into his existence. He prospers in his farm; he has Nestor under his roof in the shape of your wiseacre of an uncle; and he has you! Providence must have been puzzled to find a way to hurt him. And she hasn't hit him under the belt either, for never a man enjoyed finer health. Now where can he have come across melancholy? I suppose it's his hereafter, or non-hereafter, that's bothering him. Yet I should judge that the man was too sane to waste good time in this world fretting because he doesn't believe in another."
"It's a cloud-shadow that will pass, I hope."
"I hope so heartily—such a balanced mind as he has. Now if I began to whine—one who never did carry any ballast—you could understand it. Look ahead and compare our innings. His will end gloriously with children and grandchildren and all the rest of it. And I—but if I painted the picture you'd probably say I was a morbid, ungrateful idiot."
"Very likely; and I should probably be quite right. There's a great duty staring you in the face now, Christo, and nobody who cares for you will be contented or happy until you've tackled it like a man. Don't look so innocent; you know perfectly well what I mean."