With that shot at his employer McLean strode off, fuming.
Steve hung back beside Caleb on the return trip up the hill. Not once did he speak, and Caleb, aware of his thinned lips and the bleak whiteness of his face, did not know what to say himself. He only knew that he, too, felt unreasonably bitter against Allison for his burst of mirth. Not until they had left Barbara and her father at their own gate and were crossing the Hunter lawn did Caleb attempt any remark whatsoever.
"I—you musn't feel badly just because you didn't know that three-quarters and six-eighths were the same, Steve," awkwardly he tried to comfort him. "I guess there was a time when Allison, in spite of all his tutors, didn't know it himself, if the truth's old."
Then Caleb learned that Steve had not even heard Allison's burst of laughter. He whirled—the boy—and his eyes blazed, hurt, shamed, bitter, into Caleb's kindly ones. He shook with the very vehemence of the words that came through twitching lips.
"She didn't hev no call to smile like that at me," he flung out. "If I'd ever hed a chance to learn that they wa'n't no difference between them figgers, and hedn't knowed, she could'a smiled. But I—I ain't hed my chance—yit!"
He swung around and stumbled blindly up the steps and groped his way upstairs.
Caleb stood there for a long time, motionless, and the one thought uppermost in his mind was that Steve, like Allison, was scarcely woman-wise. A low muttering behind him finally recalled him to himself, and when he turned he saw that here were thunder-heads piling up in the southwest. One long finger of black cloud was already poked up over the horizon. He remembered the boy's prophecy of the breakfast table; remembered what McLean had said in scorn of trivial things, and he went upstairs to urge Steve to remain and join them in their fishing trip on Monday—the trip north which Allison had proposed, if it rained.
He found the boy stretched, face down, upon the bed, a rigid figure of misery. Out of his deep desire to heal his hurt he even promised him the use of a most precious rod; he promised to teach him to cast a fly, come Monday!
And when the boy finally nodded his head in mute assent, he left him alone for a while—alone with his bruised spirit that was bigger than the spare little body which housed it.