“Oh, there you are! Why, mother, father, where have you been?”
There was no reply. The old man choked back a cough and bent to flick a bit of dust from his coat. The old woman turned and crept away, her erect little figure looking suddenly bent and old.
“Why, what--” began John, as his father, too, turned away. “Why, Edith, you don’t suppose--” He stopped with a helpless frown.
“Perfectly natural, my dear, perfectly natural,” returned Mrs. John lightly. “We’ll get them away immediately. It’ll be all right when once they are started.”
Some hours later a very tired old man and a still more tired old woman crept into a pair of sumptuous, canopy-topped twin beds. There was only one remark.
“Why, Seth, mine ain’t feathers a mite! Is yours?”
There was no reply. Tired nature had triumphed--Seth was asleep.
They made a brave fight, those two. They told themselves that the chairs were easier, the carpets softer, and the pictures prettier than those that had gone under the hammer that day as they sat hand in hand in the attic. They assured each other that the unaccustomed richness of window and bed hangings and the profusion of strange vases and statuettes did not make them afraid to stir lest they soil or break something. They insisted to each other that they were not homesick, and that they were perfectly satisfied as they were. And yet--
When no one was looking Grandpa Burton tried chair after chair, and wondered why there was only one particular chair in the whole world that just exactly “fitted;” and when the twilight hour came Grandma Burton wondered what she would give to be able just to sit by the old cradle and talk with the past.