“But I never dreamed of such a thing,” Dan protested. “She’ll come with us, of course. This old place is going to be sold before long; I’ve just about talked her into it, and she can get real money for it now. Land along here is worth something mighty pretty these days. Why, Fred Oliphant’s family got seven hundred a front foot for their place three months ago, and an absolutely magnificent office-building for doctors is goin’ to be put up there. They’ve got the foundations all in and the first story’s almost up already. That’s only two blocks below here; and I can get mother almost any price she wants. I’d buy it myself and sell it again, only I wouldn’t like to feel I’d taken advantage of her. Why don’t you come on out now with Henry and me and take a look at our own doin’s? It’ll surprise you!” “Oh, some day,” she said, the absent look not disappearing from her eyes. “I’d rather lie down now, I believe. You run along with Henry.” Henry showed no great enthusiasm about accompanying his father, and when they arrived at the new house seemed indifferent to the busy work going on there. Dan was loud and jocose with him, slapping him on the back at intervals, and inquiring in a shout how it felt to “be back in God’s country again.” Upon each of these manifestations, Henry smiled with a politeness somewhat constrained, replying indistinctly; and, as they went over the building, now in a skeleton stage of structure, Dan would stop frequently and address a workman with hearty familiarity: “Look what I got with me, Shorty! Just got him back all the way from Europe! How’d _you_ like to have a boy as near a man as this? Pretty fine! Yes, sir; pretty fine, Shorty!” And he would throw his ponderous arm about his son’s thin shoulders, and Henry would bear the embrace with a bored patience, but move away as soon as he could find an excuse to do so. He was a dark, slender, rather sallow boy, short for the sixteen years he verged upon, though his face, with its small and shapely features, like his mother’s, looked older and profoundly reticent. It was one of those oldish young faces that seem too experienced not to understand the wisdom of withholding everything; and Henry appeared to be most of all withholding when he was with his boisterous, adoring father. Obviously this was not because the boy had any awe of Dan. On the contrary, as one of the friendly and admiring carpenters observed, “The Big Fellow, he’s so glad to have that son of his back he just can’t keep his hands off him; wants to jest hug him all the time, and it makes the kid tired. Well, I can remember when I was like that—thought I knew it all, and my old man didn’t know nothin’! I expect this kid does know a few things the Big Fellow doesn’t know he knows, mebbe! Looks like that kind of a kid to me.”