“All right,” he said. “I won’t be longer than I can help.” He had got the door open and was going to close it again.
His son laughed. “Better not shut it, father. It will let the fresh air in.”
“Oh, all right,” said the old man.
The son lingered about, giving some orders to the hired man in the vegetable garden, for an excuse, in the hope that his father might change his mind and ask him to come into the house with him; he felt it so forlorn for him to be going through those lifeless rooms alone. When he looked round, and saw his father holding the door ajar, as if impatiently waiting for him to be gone, he laughed and waved his hand to him. “All right, father? I’m going now.” But though he treated the matter so lightly with his father, he said grimly to his wife, as he passed her on their own porch, on his way to his once, “I don’t like to think of father being driven out of house and home this way.”
“Neither do I, Dick. But it can’t be helped, can it?”
“I think I could help it, if I got my hands on that fellow once.”
“No, you couldn’t, Dick. It’s not he that’s doing it. It’s Ellen; you know that well enough; and you’ve just got to stand it.”
“Yes, I suppose so,” said Richard Kenton.
“Of course, my heart aches for your poor old father, but so it would if Ellen had some kind of awful sickness. It is a kind of sickness, and you can’t fight it any more than if she really was sick.”
“No,” said the husband, dejectedly. “You just slip over there, after a while, Mary, if father’s gone too long, will you? I don’t like to have him there alone.”