They were in the midst of a great question, and they sat down on the decaying doorstep to have it out; Hilbrook having gone in for his hat and come out again, with its soft wide brim shading his thin face, frosted with half a week's beard. "But character," the minister urged at a certain point,--"what becomes of character? You may suppose that life can be lavished by its Origin in the immeasurable superabundance which we see in nature. But character,--that is a different thing; that cannot die." "The beasts that perish have character; my old dog had. Some are good and some bad; they're kind and they're ugly." "Ah, excuse me! That isn't character; that's temperament. Men have temperament, too; but the beasts haven't character. Doesn't that fact prove something,--or no, not prove, but give us some reasonable expectation of a hereafter?" Hilbrook did not say anything for a moment. He broke a bit of fragrant spray from the flowering currant--which guarded the doorway on his side of the steps; Ewbert sat next the Spanish willow--and softly twisted the stem between his thumb and finger. "Ever hear how I came to leave Hilbrook,--West Mallow, as it was then?" he asked at last. Ewbert was forced to own that he had heard a story, but he said, mainly in Hilbrook's interest, that he had not paid much attention to it. "Thought there wa'n't much in it? Well, that's right, generally speakin'. Folks like to make up stories about a man that lives alone like me, here; and they usually get in a disappointment. I ain't goin' to go over it. I don't care any more about it now than if it had happened to somebody else; but it did happen. Josiah got the girl, and I didn't. I presume they like to make out that I've grieved over it ever since. Sho! It's forty years since I gave it a thought, that way." A certain contemptuous indignation supplanted the wonted gentleness of the old man, as if he spurned the notion of such sentimental folly. "I've read of folks mournin' all their lives through, and in their old age goin' back to a thing like that, as if it still meant somethin'. But it ain't true; I don't suppose I care any more for losin' her now than Josiah would for gettin' her if he was alive. It did make a difference for a while; I ain't goin' to deny that. It lasted me four or five years, in all, I guess; but I was married to somebody else when I went to the war,"--Ewbert controlled a start of surprise; he had always taken it for granted that Hilbrook was a bachelor,--"and we had one child. So you may say that I was well over that first thing. _It wore out_; and if it wa'n't that it makes me mad to have folks believin' that I'm sufferin' from it yet, I presume I shouldn't think of it from one year's end to another. My wife and I always got on well together; she was a good woman. She died when I was away at the war, and the little boy died after I got back. I was sorry to lose her, and I thought losin' _him_ would kill me. It didn't.