“Well, I half wish Sol Mantring’s sloop had stayed down to York, if that’s all the news it could bring,” said Mrs. Hayn, replacing her spectacles in their tin case, which she closed with a decided snap. “Such a little speck of news is only aggravatin’: that’s what ’tis.”
“Small favors thankfully received, old lady, as the advertisements sometimes say. Oh, there was one thing more Sol said: ’twas that he reckoned Phil was dead gone on that Tramlay gal.”
Mrs. Hayn received this information in silence; her husband began to throw his open knife at a leaf on one of the veranda steps.
“I don’t see how Sol Mantring was to know anything like that,” said Mrs. Hayn, after a short silence. “He isn’t the kind that our Phil would go an’ unbosom to, if he had any such thing to tell, which it ain’t certain he had.”
“Young men don’t always have to tell such things, to make ’em known,” suggested the farmer. “Pooty much everybody knowed when I was fust gone on you, though I didn’t say nothin’ to nobody, not even to the gal herself.”
“If it’s so,” said Mrs. Hayn, after another short pause, “mebbe it explains why he hain’t writ. He’d want to tell us ’fore anybody else, an’ he feels kind o’ bashful like.”
“You’ve got a good mem’ry, Lou Ann,” said the old farmer, rising, and pinching his wife’s ear.
“What do you mean, Reuben?”
“Oh, nothin’, ’xcept that you hain’t forgot the symptoms,—that’s all.”
“Sho!” exclaimed the old lady, giving her husband a push, though not so far but that she was leaning on his shoulder a moment later. “ ‘Twould be kind o’ funny if that thing was to work, though, wouldn’t it?” she continued; “that is, if Sol’s right.”