"About the nose? Mary's is sharper."
"The forehead, I think. Hair has the same curly twist."
Grey, hearing the whisper, colored, and laughed, and presently took off the Shaker hood.
"'Pon my soul, mother, it's a remarkable likeness.—You're not related to the Furnesses, Miss Gurney,—Furnesses of Tennessee?"
"Pratt sees his wife in every woman he meets," said his mother, toeing off her sock.
She had not much patience with Pratt's wife-worship: some of these days he'd be sold to those Furnesses, soul and body. They were a mawkish, "genteel" set: from genteel people might the Lord deliver her!
"Does the boy look like this one at all, mother?—I never saw my boy, Miss Gurney,"—explaining. "Fellows are shirking so now, I won't ask for a furlough."
"The child's a Shelby, out and out,"—angrily enough. "Look here, Dr. Blecker,"—pulling up her skirt, to come at an enormous pocket in her petticoat. "Here's the daguerreotype, taken when he was just four weeks old, and there's Pratt's eyes and chin to a T. D'ye see? Pratt was a fine child,—weighed fourteen pounds. But he was colicky to the last degree. And as for croup——Does your Pen have croup, Miss Grey? Sit here. These men won't care to hear our talk."
They did care to hear it. It was not altogether because Blecker was weakened by sickness that he lay there listening and talking so earnestly about their home and Grey's, the boy and Mary,—telling trifles, too, which he remembered, of his own childhood. It was such a new, cordial, heartsome life which this bit of innocent gossip opened to him. What a happy fellow old Pratt was, with his wife and child! Good fighter, too. Well, some day, maybe, he, too——
They were all quiet that night, coming closer together, maybe because they heard the rain rushing down the gorges, and knew what ruin and grief and slaughter waited without. Looking back at that night often through the vacancy of coming days, Paul used to say, "I was at home then," and after that try to whistle its thought off in a tune. He never had been at home before.