“Oh, something so horrid happened yesterday! I meant to keep it to myself, but I can’t.” Betty’s cheeks were red, her eyes were flashing. “I was at Mrs. Kennedy’s, with those books, and she asked if there was anything the matter with father, he had been looking so worn lately. She thought outsiders always noticed those things more quickly than the family.” “The idea!” said Mrs. Harlow, indignantly. “Then when I was in the hall I heard them talking; I couldn’t help it. They said—she and Mrs. Bradley—what a pity it was when a man didn’t get on well in business, and Mrs. Tower said she was always so sorry for the wife of an unsuccessful man; it must be so dreadful, if you had any ambition, to see your husband a failure. She said she never could really respect a man who showed himself deficient. I was so angry I could hardly walk home. I went up-stairs and cried. I wanted to burst right in and tell them how nobly father had behaved when that old Johnson absconded, and how he was trying to pay up all the back debts. But I knew it wasn’t any use——” “Deficient!” Mrs. Harlow’s eyes glittered. “Your father’s brain—well, your father’s brain is far beyond most people’s. How he can make all those calculations the way he does——” She paused. Her own education dated back of the modern era. She was sound on the arithmetic of her butcher’s and grocer’s books, but beyond that all figures looked to her much like a drop of water seen through a microscope. “There’s the whistle!” said Betty, suddenly jumping up and making for the train to meet her best friend. The subject of this conversation had meanwhile been wending his way to the town. He perhaps had looked forward to a time of pecuniary ease and leisure, when, instead of tinkering round the house, he might play golf. But no one, not even his wife, quite understood what a holiday meant to Mr. Harlow. To escape for a solid block of sunlit secular hours out of the grimy, artificially lighted, badly ventilated office, with its white, tired-looking clerks, and its association of intricate, harassing toil—to escape from this to the peacefulness of green grass, and the click of the lawn-mower, and the flickering of shade from the new leaves of the elms that arched the street, and the sweet voices of little children calling to one another, was to go back into a little corner of the emerald fields of boyhood. Mr. Harlow was not in the least old; he was indeed barely middle-aged; yet there were moments when he knew that he was not so young as he had been. On the spring morning of a holiday the thought, even if it came, was robbed of its shadow. His face had the kind smile that children always trusted, as he stopped to pick up a tiny, curly-haired girl who had fallen in his way. The action showed him the letter, which he had forgotten, still in his hand.