His father turned his head from the frying-pan from which the bacon sent up its thin blue wreaths of smoke. “What’s a trumpet? It’s a great, gleaming brass horn which always, always has been blown where there has been a victory--like this!” He flung up his arm, holding an imaginary trumpet to his lips, “Taran_ta_! Taran_ta_!” He sounded it out ringingly! “That’s the way they sounded when Mr. Valiant crossed the Dark River.” “Taran_ta_!” murmured Stephen to himself. “And all the twumpets sounded.” He sat in the sun on the kitchen floor, looking up at his crippled father frying bacon. For both of them the kitchen was ringing with the bright brazen shout of victory. _Men thrive in the Valley of Humiliation._ Chapter 14 Lester was glad to see Mattie Farnham come bustling in the very afternoon of the day she returned from Maine. He liked Mattie--indeed he almost loved her--in spite of the fact that so far as he had been able to ascertain she had never yet understood anything he ever said to her. They did not use at all the same vocabulary, but they held friendly communication by means of sign-language, like a dog and cat who have grown up in the same house and have an old affection for each other. “Hello there, Mattie,” he welcomed her, as she entered. “How are the potatoes in Maine? Ours have spots in them.” It amused him with Mattie to disconcert her decent sense of what was the suitable attitude to strike. He knew that both she and her husband were relieved to have their ninety-year-old, bed-ridden aunt safely and painlessly in the next world. Blessed if he’d go through the motions of condoling with her. But he saw at once that he had shocked not her sense of the proper attitude about Aunt Emma but about himself. She had come over prepared to “sympathize” with him. Mattie always had to go through the proper motions. “How are you getting _on_, Lester?” she asked earnestly, with her best Ladies’ Guild flatness of intonation. “You can’t imagine how I have worried about you and poor Eva and the dear children. I’ve been sick to think I wasn’t here to help out in this sad time. Now I’m back you must let me do everything I can.” “You might come and call on Stephen and me once in a while and bring us some of your famous home-cooking,” he suggested mischievously. She laughed, in spite of herself, at his jibe over her weakness for delicatessen potato salad. “You miserable _sinner_!” she cried, in her own voice, dropping for an instant into their old joking relationship. She sobered at once, however, into what Lester called to himself the “mourners-waiting-for-the-benediction manner” and said, “I was planning as I walked over how I could arrange my own work to have two hours free every afternoon and come here to do for you.”