Sim was mending the pasture fence as Lily came down the road toward him. He had delayed going to dinner to finish his task and was just about ready to go when Lily spoke to him.
"Good morning, Mr. Burns. I am just going down to see Mrs. Burns. It must be time to go to dinner—aren't you ready to go? I want to talk with you."
Ordinarily he would have been delighted with the idea of walking down the road with the school-ma'am, but there was something in her look which seemed to tell him that she knew all about his trouble, and, besides, he was not in good humor.
"Yes, in a minnit—soon's I fix up this hole. Them shoats, I b'lieve, would go through a key-hole, if they could once get their snoots in."
He expanded on this idea as he nailed away, anxious to gain time. He foresaw trouble for himself. He couldn't be rude to this sweet and fragile girl. If a man had dared to attack him on his domestic shortcomings, he could have fought. The girl stood waiting for him, her large, steady eyes full of thought, gazing down at him from the shadow of her broad-brimmed hat.
"The world is so full of misery anyway, that we ought to do the best we can to make it less," she said at last, in a musing tone, as if her thoughts had unconsciously taken on speech. She had always appealed to him strongly, and never more so than in this softly-uttered abstraction—that it was an abstraction added to its power with him.
He could find no words for reply, but picked up his hammer and nail-box, and slouched along the road by her side, listening without a word to her talk.
"Christ was patient, and bore with his enemies. Surely we ought to bear with our—friends," she went on, adapting her steps to his. He took off his torn straw hat and wiped his face on his sleeve, being much embarrassed and ashamed. Not knowing how to meet such argument, he kept silent.
"How is Mrs. Burns?" said Lily at length, determined to make him speak. The delicate meaning in the emphasis laid on is did not escape him.
"Oh, she's all right—I mean she's done her work jest the same as ever. I don't see her much"——