Saturday brings the boys, boisterous and jubilant. The five young people spend the balmy September noon poking about all the haunts of the past, paying pilgrimages to the shrine of their childish pleasures and mishaps, hunting up scraps of personal property, moldy relics in outhouses and farm-sheds; and Addie, all the troubles of her short matronhood laid aside, in a plain unflounced skirt—the simplest in her trousseau—thickly booted, trips by their side and enters into all their pleasures with a heart, for the time being, as light as their own.
It is after six o'clock when they return, stained, dusty, disheveled, to prepare for dinner and a decorous greeting of their host.
"I say, Addie," asked Bob incidentally, "isn't it time your skipper was due? Does he stick to the shop all Saturday too?"
"I don't know," she answers, suddenly, sobered by this the first allusion to her absent lord. "This is the first Saturday I've spent here since—since I was married. But he always comes home on other days at six; he ought to be in now. Ah, here is a note from him on the table! I—I wonder what's it about?"
She reads it through quietly, and then says, in a low voice—
"Mr. Armstrong is not returning to dinner this evening. He has business detaining him in Kelvick."
"Not coming back this evening! Good man, good man!"
"More power to you, Tom!"
"Hurrah!" shout the boys in a breath.