“Oh!” she said; “you have been lonely!”
“I have been something worse than that!” he answered, and the gloom came back to his face. “I have been afraid.”
“Afraid!” said Sheba. “Of what?”
“That I might end like him. How do I know? It is in my blood.”
“Oh, no!” she cried.
“We have nearly all been like that,” he said. “He was the maddest of them all, but he was only like many of the others. We grow tall, we De Willoughbys, we have black eyes, we drink and we make ourselves insane with morphine. It’s a ghastly thing to think of,” he shuddered. “When I am lonely, I think of it night and day.”
“You must not,” she said. “I—I will help you to forget it.”
“I have often wondered if there was anyone who could,” he answered. “I think perhaps you might.”
When they returned to the Cross-roads there were several customers loitering on the post-office porch, awaiting their arrival, and endeavouring to wear an air of concealing no object whatever. The uneventful lives they led year after year made men and women alike avid for anything of the nature of news or incident. In some mysterious way the air itself seemed to communicate to them anything of interest which might be impending. Big Tom had not felt inclined to be diffuse on the subject of the arrival of his nephew, but each customer who brought in a pail of butter or eggs, a roll of jeans or a pair of chickens, seemed to become enlightened at once as to the position of affairs.
“Ye see,” Tom heard Doty confiding to a friend as they sat together outside a window of the store; “ye see, it’s this way—the D’Willerbys was born ’ristycrats. I dunno as ye’d think it to look at Tom. Thar’s a heap to Tom, but he ain’t my idee of a ’ristycrat. My idee is thet mebbe he let out from D’lisleville kase he warn’t ’ristycratic enough fur ’em. Thar wus a heap of property in the family, ’pears like. An’ now the hull lot of ’em’s dead ’cept this yere boy that come last night. Stamps hes seen him in D’lisleville, an’ he says he’s a-stavin’ lookin’ young feller, an’ thet thar’s somethin’ about a claim on the Guv’ment thet ef Tom an’ him don’t foller up, they’re blamed fools. Now Tom, he ain’t no blamed fool. Fur not bein’ a blamed fool, I’ll back Tom agin any man in Hamlin.”