And then the family had to have supper, over and done with, a little after six, and Tom didn’t dare go outside the house until dark. It wouldn’t do to have the Bardshares see him so fixed up. It was their wedding anniversary, and they might suspect something. He kept trotting about the house, and occasionally looked out of the front window toward the Bardshare house. “You kid, you,” Kate said, laughing. Sometimes she talked up to him like that, and after she said it he went upstairs, and getting out his cornet blew on it, so softly, you could hardly hear him downstairs. When he did that you couldn’t tell how badly he played, as when the band was going it on Main Street and he had to carry a passage right through alone. He sat in the room upstairs thinking. When Kate laughed at him it was like having his wife back, alive. There was the same shy sarcastic gleam in her eyes. Well, it was the first time he had been out anywhere since his wife had died, and there might be some people think it would be better if he stayed at home now—look better, that is. When he had shaved he had cut his chin, and the blood had come. After a time he went downstairs and stood before the looking-glass, hung above the kitchen sink, and dabbed at the spot with the wet end of a towel. Will and Fred stood about. Will’s mind was working—perhaps Kate’s, too. “Was there—could it be?—well, at such a party—only older people invited—there were always two or three widow women thrown in for good measure, as it were.” Kate didn’t want any woman fooling around her kitchen. She was twenty years old. “And it was just as well not to have any monkey-shine talk about motherless children,” such as Tom might indulge in. Even Fred thought that. There was a little wave of resent against Tom in the house. It was a wave that didn’t make much noise, just crept, as it were softly, up a low sandy beach. “Widow women went to such places, and then of course, people were always going home in couples.” Both Kate and Will had the same picture in mind. It was late at night and in fancy they were both peeking out at front upper windows of the Appleton house. There were all the people coming out at the front door of the Bardshare house, and Bill Bardshare was standing there and holding the door open. He had managed to sneak away during the evening, and got his Sunday clothes on all right. And the couples were coming out. “There was that woman now, that widow, Mrs. Childers.” She had been married twice, both husbands dead now, and she lived away over Maumee Pike way. “What makes a woman of her age want to act silly like that? It is the very devil how a woman can keep looking young and handsome after she has buried two men. There are some who say that, even when her last husband was alive—”