“My brother is a fool in some directions, as I’m free to say both to him and to inquirin’ friends,” reported Hiram. “But he’s a fool only about so fur and then he stops. Don’t you set up nights worryin’ about that, Sime. Phin has got a blister or two from the Willard fam’ly lately and the swellin’ ain’t gone down yet.”
After freeing his mind on such occasions as this, Hiram lighted another of his long cigars, hunched down in his chair, and perused figures in a dog’s-eared notebook with intense satisfaction.
On the afternoon of the day before town meeting something that Squire Phin had been vaguely dreading happened to him.
He was walking slowly home, avoiding the sidewalk pools that the chill of late afternoon had crusted. His head was bowed, either in thought or to watch his steps, and he did not see Sylvena Willard standing at the gate until she spoke to him.
“Phineas, I would not have troubled you, but the matter is of the utmost importance. I do not feel like discussing it by the roadside. Won’t you step to the house?”
He glanced at her with a sort of timidity in his demeanour. Her face, half shielded by the shawl caught lightly around her head, was very grave. It seemed to him that her temple locks had more gray in them than when he saw her last.
He hesitated only for a moment, then opened the iron gate and accompanied her up the broad path to the porch. Neither spoke on the way.
In the big, gloomy parlour, in the corners of which old-fashioned chairs of dark wood seemed to lurk like uncouth animals in the afternoon shadows, he sat gazing at her, still without speaking.
Her hands picked restlessly at the fringes of the shawl that she had dropped across her lap.
Beyond the closed double doors that shut off the adjoining room there sounded music faintly. It was the tinkly melody of an automatic music box, but the Squire, having no very keen ear for tunes, did not recognise what this one was playing, only vaguely realising that it was something he had heard before, probably at a vestry meeting. It seemed to have a hymn flavour.