"I declare," Tom said, coming home at twelve o'clock at night—"I declare I feel younger."
Milly was silent.
Then Tom began to whistle:
Then he broke off to say that he didn't think that Helen Hayes was over-happy at home. "The Hayeses are commonplace people, and she is very superior. I guess they don't get along well."
Milly thought to herself that when a girl didn't get along with her own mother it didn't speak well for the girl; but she did not say so.
But Thomas went on to declare that he didn't know what to make of Ned. "Hanging round the Hayeses till I'm ashamed of him! Why doesn't he know better? I never bored a woman to death when I was his age." And his wife thought, in heavy silence, that there were other people who hung round the Hayeses.
However, Thomas made his feeling so clear to his son that during the winter Ned was never seen at the Hayeses' on the same evening that his father was there. But there was an hour in the afternoon, from five to six, when the boy was free and Thomas was busy with his spades and buckets;—but you can't look after a boy every minute.