“Well, I don’t know but what a good opera is to be preferred to an elopement,” answered Winthrop. “There, there, Major, I don’t mean to be flippant. The fact is we hear of so many of these ‘crimes of passion’ up our way nowadays that we take them with the same equanimity that we take the weather predictions. The woman was just a good sample of her sort as the man was doubtless a good sample of his. He was lucky to be out of it, only he didn’t realize it and so killed himself. That’s the deuce of it, you see, Major; a man who can look a thousand fathoms into a woman’s eyes and keep his judgment from slipping a cog is—well, he just isn’t; he doesn’t exist! And if he did you and I, Major, wouldn’t have anything to do with him.”
“Shucks!” grunted the Major, half in agreement, half in protest.
“But I hope this boy won’t follow his father’s lead, just the same,” said Winthrop.
“No, no,” answered the Major, energetically; “he won’t, he won’t. He—he’s better fitted for hard knocks than his dad was. I—we had just had a few words and I was—ah—displeased. Shall we join the ladies inside, Mr. Winthrop?”
The Major drove back to town in his side-bar buggy behind his aged gray mule at sunset, taking Miss Parish with him. Miss India retired to her room, and Julian and Holly strolled off together down the road. Winthrop drew the arm-chair up to the fireplace in his room and smoked and read until supper time. At that meal only he and Holly and Julian were present, and the conversation was confined principally to the former two. Julian was plainly out of sorts and short of temper; his wooing, Winthrop concluded, had not gone very well that day. Holly seemed troubled, but whether over Julian’s unhappiness or his impoliteness Winthrop could not guess. After supper they went out to the porch for a while together, but Winthrop soon bade them good-night. For some time through the opened windows he could hear the faint squeaking of the joggling-board and the fainter hum of their low voices. At ten Julian’s horse was brought around, and he clattered away in the starlit darkness toward Marysville. He heard Holly closing the door down-stairs, heard her feet patter up the uncarpeted stairway, heard her humming a little tune under her breath. The lamp was still lighted on his table, and doubtless the radiance of it showed under the door, for Holly’s footsteps came nearer and nearer along the hall until—
“Good-night, slave!” she called, softly.
“Good-night, Miss Holly,” he answered.
He heard her footsteps dying away, and finally the soft closing of a door. Thoughtfully he refilled his pipe and went back to the chair in front of the dying fire....
The ashes were cold and a chill breeze blew through the open casements. Winthrop arose with a shiver, knocked the ashes from his pipe and dropped it on the mantel.
“There’s no fool like an old—like a middle-aged fool,” he muttered, as he blew out the lamp.