In the shadow of the big tree at the gate he gazed at the darkened house. The lonely boy tried to imagine Carol still in the place, awaiting his whistle. Once he did whistle, for at heart he was much of a child. But he was whistling at the husk of a memory. The soul of the Cuttner homestead had departed.
In his loneliness that night, locked finally in his room, the boy’s emotions overpowered him and he sobbed. Johnathan, listening at the door, finally tiptoed back to his own room.
“He’s crying,” the man told his wife. “He’s sorry! But he’ll come to see that his father knew best after all!”
“Poor Nat!” sighed the mother. “He does go into things head-over-heels so—even a little passing acquaintance with a strange girl.”
“Those tears will bring him back to God,” opined Johnathan.
“Oh, bosh!” snapped Anna Forge. She rolled angrily as far from Johnathan as she could get and in this contorted position sighed at her own hard lot and fell asleep.
II
The remainder of that summer and autumn and the ensuing winter, when Nat turned twenty, was a time of comment-causing expansion for the box-shop.
The town had been left for Nathan—though a town with its soul gone out, like Archibald Cuttner’s house—and the factory had been left—and work—and memories. But the greatest of these was work. The boy threw himself into business with a febrile intensity which alarmed his father almost as much as it pleased him. Alarmed him because he could not exactly account for it. Also he had difficulty keeping up with his son in the matter of handling the business. This aroused his ire.
Nathan, as has been emphasized, had received an invaluable training under old Caleb Gridley. Moreover, after Carol left, in order to anesthetize his loneliness, the boy spent evening after evening with old Caleb. Sometimes this queer pair indulged their esthetic souls in poetry,—Cowper, Wordsworth, Keats, Pope, Browning; Old Caleb would sit in his big chair before the fire, slipper swinging, vest unbuttoned, iron-gray head nodding in approval, as the lad’s musical voice rose and fell in cadence of the finer selections.