“She’s better off than she ever was. She sold her house and lot and the Grimes sawmill two years ago, and now she’s living off the fat of the land. She was the one who proposed the housekeeper scheme, not me. I tried to argue her out of it. Wasn’t any use. I said that people would be sure to talk if she came over and lived at my house. Make a regular scandal out of it. But she just laughed and said nothing in the world would tickle her so much as to have people say complimentary things about her at her age. I was a long time figuring out what she meant. She’s sixty-nine. She says I ought to feel the same way about it, me being seventy-four. ‘Let ’em talk,’ says she, and after a while she got me to saying ‘let ’em talk.’ But the cussed part of it is, nobody thinks there’s anything scandalous about it. There hasn’t been a derned bit of talk. The only thing people say, far as I can make out, is that it’s a mighty nice arrangement. What the dickens are you laughing at, Sam?” “I just ran over a hen,” lied Samuel promptly. CHAPTER X IDLE DAYS June was well along before Oliver began seriously to contemplate bringing his self-styled “vacation” to an end. May had been glorious. Not since the year he left college had he known what it was to be idle and, in a manner of speaking, independent. He revelled in privileges that had been denied him for years—such as lying abed in the morning till he felt good and ready to turn out; strolling aimlessly whither he wished without troubling himself over the thought that he had to get back at a given time; loafing;—Lord, he couldn’t remember that there ever had been a time when he actually enjoyed the dishonorable luxury of loafing!—on street corners, in Fry’s drug store, in the public library, on friendly lawns and front porches; fishing, tramping, motoring, reading—all the things he had dreamed of in the black days across the sea. The country was green and fresh and sparkling with the glories of a summer just taking over the heritage of a blithe and bountiful spring. The dust and grit of jaded August were still far enough away to be unconsidered; the roadside bushes and hedges, the trees and the grass were without the coat of gray that settles down upon them as summer ages; the brooks and the creeks were cool and laughing in a world of plenty, disdainful of the drought that was sure to fall upon and suck them in the blistering “dog days.”