“I don't know but she looks as well as ever.”
“She's grown thin.”
“Maybe she has. Sometimes I have thought that, but what I have noticed has been something intangible in her manner and expression, that I thought was there one minute and was not at all sure about the next. I haven't known whether the trouble, or difference, as perhaps I had better put it, was with her or myself.”
Henry nodded still more emphatically. “That's just the way it's seemed to me, and we 'ain't either of us imagined it. It's so,” said he.
“Have you any idea—”
“No, I haven't the least. But my wife's got something on her mind, and she's had something on her mind for a long time. It ain't anything new.”
“Why don't you ask her?”
“I have asked her, and she says that of course she's got something on her mind, that she ain't a fool. You can't get around Sylvia. She never would tell anything unless she wanted to. She ain't like most women.”
Just then Horace turned the corner of the street leading to his school, and the conversation ceased, with an enjoinder on his part to Henry not to be disturbed about it, as he did not think it could be anything serious.
Henry's reply rang back as the two men went their different ways. “I don't suppose it can be anything serious,” he said, almost angrily.