"Whar's her husband, anyway?" asked a stout, elderly man in linen trousers and faded alpaca coat, who was seated on two boxes of pearl starch, one on top of the other. "I've heard that he was a member of the legislatur'. Is that so?" "He's not that, you can take my word for it," said Tom Peckett. "Old Miss Keswick give me to understand that he was in the fertilizing business." "That ought to be a good thing for the old lady," said the man on the starch boxes. "She'll git a discount off her gwarner." "I never did see," said the pensive neighbor on the brogan case, "how such things do git twisted. It was only yesterday that I met a man at Tyson's Mill, who'd just come over from the Valley, and he said he'd seen this Mr Noles over thar. He's a hoss doctor, and he's going up through all the farms along thar." "I reckon when he gits up as fur as he wants to go," said the man on the starch boxes, "he'll come here and settle fur awhile." "That won't be so much help to the old lady," said the storekeeper, "for it wouldn't pay to keep a neffy-in-law just to doctor one sorrel horse and a pa'r o' oxen." "I reckon his wife must be 'spectin' him," said the man on the brogan case, "from her comin' after fancy vittles." "If he do come," said the stout, elderly neighbor, "I wish you'd let me know, Tom Peckett, fur my black mar has got a hitch in her shoulder I can't understand, and I'd like him to look at her." The storekeeper smiled at the pensive man, and the pensive man smiled back at the storekeeper. "You needn't trouble yourself about that young woman's husband," said Mr Peckett. "There'll be a horse doctor coming along afore you know it, and he'll attend to that old mar of yourn without chargin' you a cent." CHAPTER XXI. The second afternoon of Lawrence Croft's confinement in the little building in Mrs Keswick's yard, passed drearily enough. The sky retained its sombre covering of clouds, and the rain came down in a melancholy, capricious way, as if it were tears shed by a child who was crying because it was bad. The monotony of the slowly moving hours was broken only by a very brief visit from the old lady, who was going somewhere in the covered spring wagon, and who looked in, before she started, to see if her patient wanted anything; and by the arrival of a bundle of old novels sent by Mrs Null. These books Lawrence looked over with indifferent interest, hoping to find one among them that was not a love story, but he was disappointed. They were all based upon, and most of them permeated with, the tender passion, and Lawrence was not in the mood for reading about that sort of thing. A person afflicted with a disease is not apt to find agreeable occupation in reading hospital reports upon his particular ailment.