Phil nodded affirmatively.
“Now you see what comes of goin’ off at half-cock,” said the farmer. “Lost your expenses two ways, to say nothin’ of peace o’ mind.”
“I heard one man telling another it,” said Phil, quite humbly: “so what was I to think?”
“If you believe ev’rythin’ you hear about men an’ women, my boy, you’ll be off your course all your life long. Take a good grip on that.”
Again Phil went into a brown study, from which he emerged suddenly to say,—
“It’s just what you did, when you supposed you learned she wasn’t engaged, isn’t it? You believed it, and wrote it at once to me.”
“Oh, no!” said the old man, with an air of superiority as he put a very sharp point on what remained of the tooth-pick. “Not much. I’ve learned always to go to head-quarters for information.”
“Why, father,” Phil exclaimed, excitedly, “you don’t mean to say, after what you promised me, that you went—and—and——”
“Poked my nose into other people’s business? Not I. Mr. Tramlay took me home to dinner,—say, what an outlandish way these city folks have got of not eatin’ dinner till nigh onto bed-time!—an’ after the meal, ’long about the edge o’ the evenin’, when Tramlay had gone for some papers to show me, an’ the old lady was out of the room for somethin’, I took ’casion to congratulate the gal on her engagement; that’s the proper thing in such cases made an’ purvided, you know. She looked kind o’ flabbergasted, an’ at last she said ’twas the fust she’d heerd of it. I tried to git out of it by sayin’ if it wa’n’t true it ort to be, if young men in York had eyes in their heads. But it didn’t seem to work. She asked how I heerd of it, an’ I had to say that somebody in the city had told my son about it.”
Phil frowned.