“Albert seems to thrive on country fare,” he said, perhaps unconsciously suggesting in his remark what was turning in his mind--that she herself seemed not have thrived. The rounded outlines of her chin and throat were not so perfect as he remembered them. She looked thin and tired now, in the strong light, and there was no color to speak of in her face. “Oh, yes!” she said, with that falling inflection which is sister to the sigh, and keeping her eyes bent upon her work, “_he_ grows fat. I did not imagine that a man who had always been so active, who was so accustomed to regular office work and intellectual professional pursuits, could fall into idle ways so easily. But it is always a bore to him now when he has to go down to New York at term time. Once or twice he has had a coolness with his partners because he failed to go at all. I shouldn’t be surprised if he gave New York up altogether. He talks often of it--of practising at Tecumseh instead. Oh, and that reminds me. You can tell. What relation does Tecumseh bear to this place? I know they have some connection in his mind, because he spoke once of the ‘pull’--whatever that may mean--being a Tecumseh lawyer would give him here. I know they are not in the same county, for I looked on the map. Whatever it is, that would be his purpose in going there, I am curious to learn. You know,” she added, with a smile and tone pathetic in their sarcasm, “a wife ought to be interested in whatever concerns her husband.” “They are in the same Congressional district,” Seth replied. “There are three counties in the district, Dearborn (where we are now), Jay, which lies east of us, and then Adams, which is a long, narrow county, and runs off South of Dearborn. Tecumseh is away at the extreme southern end of Adams county. Perhaps that is what you have in mind.” “It is what _he_ has in mind,” she said. “But how does Albert fill his time here--what does he do?” “In about equal parts,” she made answer, lifting her eyes again, with the light of a little smile in them now, “he reads novels here in the house, and drives about the neighborhood. What time he is not in the easy-chair upstairs, devouring fiction, he is in his buggy on the road. He won’t let me have anybody up from New York, even of the few I know, but he has developed a wonderful taste for striking up acquaintances here. He must by this time know every farmer for twenty miles around. First of all, in buying his stock when he took the farm, he spread his purchases around in the queerest way--getting a cow from this man, a colt from another, a pig here and a bull there. Milton and he went together, and they must have driven two hundred miles, I should think, collecting the various animals.