"Mr. Brown is always doing things without consulting me," she explained to Bradley, "but you are welcome, sir, if our lonesome house aint worse than your cellar. Mr. Brown very seldom takes the trouble to explain what he wants to do, but I'll try to make you feel at home, sir."
They ate the rest of the meal in silence. The Judge was evidently thinking over old times, and it would be very difficult to say what his wife was thinking of. At last he rose saying:
"Now if you'll come out, I'll show you the well and the cow." As he went by his wife's chair, he stopped a moment, and said gently, "He'll do us two lonely old fossils good, Elizabeth." His hand lay on her shoulder an instant as he passed, and when Bradley went out of the room, he saw her wiping her eyes upon her handkerchief, her glasses in her hand.
The Judge coughed a little. "We never had but one child--a boy. He was killed while out hunting"--he broke off quickly. "Now here's the meal for the cow. I give her about a panful twice a day--when I don't forget it."
Somehow, Mrs. Brown didn't seem so hard when he met her again at supper. The line of her mouth was softer. In his room he found many little touches of her motherly hand--a clean, sweet bed, and little hand-made things upon the wall, that made him think of his own mother, who had been dead since his sixteenth year. He had never had such a room as this. It appeared to him as something very fine. Its frigid atmosphere and lack of grace and charm did not appear to his eyes. It was nothing short of princely after his cellar.
His knowledge of the inner life of the common Western homes made him feel that this rigid coldness between the Judge and his wife was only their way. The touch of the Judge's hand on her shoulder meant more than a thousand worn phrases spoken every day. Under that silence and reserve there was a deep of tenderness and wistful longing which they could not utter, and dared not acknowledge, even to themselves. Their lonely house had grown intolerable, and Bradley came into it bringing youth and sunlight.
The suffering of the county papers was acute. They had supported the "incumbents" for so long, and had derived a reciprocal support so long, that they could not bring themselves to a decision. The Democratic paper, the _Call_, was too feeble to be anything distinctive at this stage of its career. Chard Foster had not yet assumed control of it. It lent a half-hearted support to the Independent movement, and justified its action on the ground that it was really a Democratic movement leading toward reform, and it assumed to be the only paper advocating reform. The other paper, unequivocally Republican, supported the regular ticket with that single-heartedness of enmity, born of bribery, or that ignorance which shuts out any admission that the other side has a case.