Not that Thomas, brooding as he watched, worked things out for himself like this. He only said to himself that his father, when he was young, might have done better with a bit of stirring up. It was right enough for a man to come back to his own place, as he himself had done, but it did him no harm to have a look at other methods first. Rooted and grooved in a spot, he might never grow up, and so throw the whole chain of existence out of gear. This bother, for instance, of the last few years—why, it should never have been allowed to happen at all. If Kit could have framed a little better at his job ... if he could have hung on a bit longer ... made a little brass ... but where was the use of thinking about that now? Farther than this little mental growl, Thomas neither argued nor blamed. He accepted his father and his doings as he had accepted them all his life, and traced the shadow that lay on the evening’s joy no further than himself. The three sons had been dark, silent men, caring for little beyond their work and the ordinary pastimes of their class. They had been cradled in music, but, as Thomas said, its only expression through them was in their heels. They were all good dancers, and had been known as such far and near, appearing at every gathering with their serious faces and light feet. They were wrestlers as well, though here Bob was easily first, just as in the dancing Thomas was easily first. John might have been better than either, but he had not tried or not cared. Both the younger sons had gone out to service as lads, while John stayed to help his father at home. John had never married, never gone away to stay, never moved one day out of the groove into which he had been born. He had worked hard, but without zest, and in his work had kept to the old ways, instead of moving with the times. It was almost as if he had known his life would end at thirty-eight, and so the travail of progress had not seemed to him worth while. He never talked of the future as the others did when they met, even unlucky Bob, with all the weights he had made such haste to fasten about his neck. Thomas remembered him moving alone about the level fields, a melancholy figure in spite of his youth and strength. He had been most at home with the stock, friends, whose lives, like his own, were ruled from without and had but a little day. But as long as he lived he had kept things going on the farm, just as his mother had kept things going in the house. And then, just over two years ago, the pair of them had died within a month; he, of a slipping ladder on a stack; she, in the new-established order of change. Shortly after had come the final change of all, when the living had followed the dead from out the house.