After supper, as his father was about retiring to his bedroom, Herman fixed his bright eyes on him, and something very hard and masterful came into his face.
"Old man, you and I haven't had a settlement on this thing yet. I'll see you later."
Allen shrank before his son's look, but shuffled sullenly off without uttering a word.
Herman turned to Wallace. "Stacey, I want to beg your pardon for getting you into this scrape. I didn't suppose the old gentleman would act like that. The older he gets, the more his New Hampshire granite shows. I hope you won't lay it up against me."
Wallace was too conscientious to say he didn't mind it, but he took Herman's hand in a quick clasp.
"Let's have a song," proposed Herman. "Music hath charms to soothe the savage breast, to charm a rock, and split a cabbage."
They went into the best room, where a fire was blazing, and Mattie and Herman sang hymns and old-fashioned love-songs and college glees wonderfully intermingled. They ended with Lorena, a wailing, extra sentimental love-song current in war times, and when they looked around there was a lofty look on the face of the young preacher—a look of exaltation, of consecration and resolve.
III
The next morning, at breakfast, Herman said, as he seized a hot biscuit, "We'll dispense with grace this morning, and till after the war is over." But Wallace blessed his bread in a silent prayer, and Mattie thought it very brave of him to do so.
Herman was full of mockery. "The sun rises just the same, whether it's 'sprinkling' or 'immersion.' It's lucky Nature don't take a hand in these theological contests. She doesn't even referee the scrap; she never seems to care whether you are sparring for points or fighting to a finish. What you theologic middle-weights are really fighting for I can't see—and I don't care, till you fall over the ropes on to my corns."