“Then what has happened to you to make you look like a mute at a temperance funeral?” I said:
“And how are all at home?”
I thought that if the trouble lay there he would take the opportunity. It brightened him somewhat, the necessity of replying to the question. It appeared that his wife was in the best of health.
“You remember her,” he continued with a smile; “wonderful spirits, always cheerful, nothing seems to put her out, not even—”
He ended the sentence abruptly with a sigh.
His mother-in-law, I learned from further talk with him, had died since I had last met him, and had left them a comfortable addition to their income. His eldest daughter was engaged to be married.
“It is entirely a love match,” he explained, “and he is such a dear, good fellow, that I should not have made any objection even had he been poor. But, of course, as it is, I am naturally all the more content.”
His eldest boy, having won the Mottle Scholarship, was going up to Cambridge in the Autumn. His own health, he told me, had greatly improved; and a novel he had written in his leisure time promised to be one of the successes of the season. Then it was that I spoke plainly.
“If I am opening a wound too painful to be touched,” I said, “tell me. If, on the contrary, it is an ordinary sort of trouble upon which the sympathy of a fellow worker may fall as balm, let me hear it.”
“So far as I am concerned,” he replied, “I should be glad to tell you. Speaking about it does me good, and may lead—so I am always in hopes—to an idea. But, for your own sake, if you take my advice, you will not press me.”