IT was not until ten o'clock that Mrs. Tolliver began to grow uneasy. There had been, after all, nothing to cause alarm. An hour before supper Ellen had come in from skating with a countenance fresh and almost happy. True, Gramp Tolliver had returned late from one of his expeditions—the second that day—and was noisier and more impatient than usual in his room above stairs. Indeed his uproar continued even after feeding time, until long after Ellen, saying that she was to spend the evening at the Setons', had gone out into the rising wind. If there was anything which alarmed Mrs. Tolliver it was the mutterings of the volcano overhead; so great was the variety of its manifestations that she remarked upon it to her husband.
"You know," she said, "Gramp is restless again . . . worse than ever . . . worse than he was at election time."
From his refuge on the great threadbare sofa her husband mumbled a reply, indistinct yet understandable because it was a speech he made so frequently when his wife insisted upon conversation.
"You're worrying again. . . . There's nothing to worry about."
But she knew that she was right. It was a feeling which was almost physical, an intuition, an instinct which her husband, in the way of fathers (which at best were but poor things), did not share. After all he came by his conclusions in a logical fashion, not without the aid of a peculiar and individual philosophy, and therefore, by omitting the human equation, he gave his wife the opportunity more than once of saying, "I told you so."
Though Mrs. Tolliver rocked and darned placidly enough, she was not, even out of respect for her husband's love of slumber and forgetfulness, to be kept silent. When Ellen was out and there was no flow of music to bind together the comfort of the evening, it was necessary to talk; otherwise the peace became mere stillness, and the contentment a barren boredom. For Mrs. Tolliver
