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It came about three o’clock. He did not return to the rye-field after dinner, but stayed and waited to hear what Rodney had to say. Rodney did not tell his little story well, for he foresaw trouble in the old home; but he had to face this and all coming dilemmas as best he might. With a kind of shamefacedness, yet with an attempt to carry the thing off lightly, he told Uncle Jim, while, inside, his wife told the old mother, that the business of the hotel had gone to pot (he did not say who was the cause of that), and they were selling out to his partner and coming to live on the farm.

“I’m tired anyway of the hotel job,” said Rodney. “Farming’s a better life. Don’t you think so, dad?”

“It’s better for me, Rod,” answered Uncle Jim, “it’s better for me.”

Rodney was a little uneasy. “But won’t it be better for me?” he asked.

“Mebbe,” was the slow answer, “mebbe, mebbe so.”

“And then there’s mother, she’s getting too old for the work, ain’t she?”

“She’s done it straight along,” answered the old man, “straight along till now.”

“But Millie can help her, and we’ll have a hired girl, eh?”

“I dunno, I dunno,” was the brooding answer; “the place ain’t going to stand it.”

“We’ll get more out of it,” answered Rodney. “I’ll stock it up, I’ll put more under barley. All the thing wants is working, dad. Put more in, get more out. Now ain’t that right?”

The other was looking off towards the rye-field, where, for forty years, up and down the hillside, he had travelled with the cradle and the scythe, putting all there was in him into it, and he answered, blinking along the avenue of the past:

“Mebbe, mebbe!”

Rodney fretted under the old man’s vague replies, and said: “But darn it all, can’t you tell us what you think?”

His father did not take his eyes off the rye-field. “I’m thinking,” he answered, in the same old-fashioned way, “that I’ve been working here since you were born, Rod. I’ve blundered along, somehow, just boggling my way through. I ain’t got anything more to say. The farm ain’t mine any more, but I’ll keep my scythe sharp and my axe ground just as I always did, and I’m for workin’ as I’ve always worked as long as I’m let to stay.”

“Good Lord, dad, don’t talk that way! Things ain’t going to be any different for you and mother than they are now. Only, of course–” He paused.

The old man pieced out the sentence: “Only, of course, there can’t be two women rulin’ one house, Rod, and you know it as well as I do.”

Exactly how Rodney’s wife told the old mother of the great change Rodney never knew; but when he went back to the house the grey look in his mother’s face told him more than her words ever told. Before they left that night the pink milliner had already planned the changes which were to celebrate her coming and her ruling.

So Rodney and his wife came, all the old man prophesied in a few brief sentences to his wife proving true. There was no great struggle on the mother’s part; she stepped aside from governing, and became as like a servant as could be. An insolent servant-girl came, and she and Rodney’s wife started a little drama of incompetency, which should end as the hotel-keeping ended. Wastefulness, cheap luxury, tawdry living, took the place of the old, frugal, simple life. But the mother went about with that unchanging sweetness of face, and a body withering about a fretted soul. She had no bitterness, only a miserable distress. But every slight that was put upon her, every change, every new-fangled idea, from the white sugar to the scented soap and the yellow buggy, rankled in the old man’s heart. He had resentment both for the old wife and himself, and he hated the pink milliner for the humiliation that she heaped upon them both. Rodney did not see one-fifth of it, and what he did see lost its force, because, strangely enough, he loved the gaudy wife who wore gloves on her bloodless hands as she did the house-work and spent numberless afternoons in trimming her own bonnets. Her peevishness grew apace as the newness of the experience wore off. Uncle Jim seldom spoke to her, as he seldom spoke to anybody, but she had an inkling of the rancour in his heart, and many a time she put blame upon his shoulders to her husband, when some unavoidable friction came.