Grown-up life began at once. His chief care hitherto had been as to what others would do for him; now he was preoccupied with what he could do for some one else. It was a matter of watching, planning, cheering, comforting, and as he expressed it to himself, of bucking up. Of bucking up especially he was prodigal. The man had become as limp as on the day when he had thrown himself face downward in the grass. Mad once with desire to act, he was terrified now at what he had done. Though, as far as Tom could judge, no one blamed or suspected him, there was hardly a minute in the day in which he did not betray himself. He betrayed himself to the boy even if to no one else, though betraying himself in such a way that there was nothing definite to take hold of. "I'm sure—and yet I'm not sure," was Tom's own summing up. He stressed the fact that he was not sure, and in this he was helped by the common opinion of the countryside.
Toward the bereaved husband and his adopted son this was sympathetic. The woman had always been neurasthenic, slipshod, and impossible. With a wife to help him, Martin Quidmore could have been a success as a market gardener as easily as anybody else. As it was, he would get over the shock of this tragedy and find a woman who would be the right kind of mother to a growing boy. Here, the mention
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 of Bertha was with no more than the usual spice of village scandal, tolerant and unresentful.
Of all this Tom was aware chiefly through the observations of Blanche, the colored woman who came in by the day to do the housework.
"Law, Mr. Tom, yo' pappa don't need to feel so bad. Nobody in this yere town what blame him, not a little mite. Po' Mis' Quidmo', nobody couldn't please her nohow. Don't I know? Ain't I wash her, and iron her, and do her housecleanin', ever since she come to this yere community, and Mr. Quidmo' he buy this yere lot off old Aaron Bidbury? No, suh! Nobody can't tell me! Them there giddy things what nobody can't please 'em they can't please theirselves, and some day they go to work and do somefin' despe'ate, just like po' Mis' Quidmo'. A little cup o' tea, she take. No mo'n that. See, boy! I keep that there brown teapot, what look as innocent as a baby, all the time incriminated to her memo'y."
Nevertheless, Tom found his father obsessed by fear, with nothing to be afraid of. The obsession had shown itself as soon as they entered the house on their return from Harfrey. He was afraid of the house, afraid of the kitchen especially. When Gimlets barked he jumped, cursing the dog for its noise. When a buggy drove up to the door he peeped out at the occupant before showing himself to the neighbor coming to offer his condolences. If the telephone rang Tom hastened to answer it, knowing that it set his father shivering.
As evening deepened on that first Wednesday, they kept out of doors as late as possible, the boy chatter
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ing to the best of his ability. When obliged to go in, Quidmore tried to say with solicitude on Tom's behalf:
"Expect you'll be lonesome now with only the two of us in the house. Better come and sleep in the other bed in my room."
The boy was about to reply that he was not lonesome, and preferred his own bed, when he caught the dread behind the invitation.
"All right, dad, I'll come. Sleep there every night. Then I won't be scared."
About two in the morning Tom was wakened by a shout. "Hell! Hell! Hell!"
Jumping from his own bed, he ran to the other. "Wake up, dad! Wake up!"
Ouidmore woke, confused and trembling. "Wha' matter?" His senses returning, he spoke more distinctly. "Must have had a nightmare. God! Turn on the light. Hate bein' in the dark. Now get back to bed. All right again."
The next day both were picking strawberries. It was not Quidmore's custom to pick strawberries, but he seemed to prefer a task at which he could crouch, and be more or less out of sight. Happening to glance up, he saw a stranger coming round the duck pond.
"Who's that?" he snapped, in terror.
Tom ran to the stranger, interviewed him, and ran back again. "It's an agent for a new kind of fertilizer."
"Tell him I don't want it and to get to hell out of this."
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"You'd better see him. He'll think it queer if you don't."
It was the spur he needed. He couldn't afford to be thought queer. He saw the agent, Tom acting as go-between and interpreter.
To act as go-between and interpreter became in a measure the boy's job. Being so near the holidays, he did not return to school, and freed from school, he could give all his time to helping the frightened creature to seem competent in the eyes of his customers and hired men. Not that he succeeded. None knew better than the hired men that the place was, as they put it, all in the soup; none were so quick to fall away as customers who were not getting what they wanted. When the house was tumbling about their heads one little boy's shoulder could not do much as a prop; but what it could do he offered.
He offered it with a gravity at which the men laughed good-naturedly behind his back. They took his orders solemnly, and thought no more about them. For a whole week nothing went to market. The dealers whom they supplied complained by telephone. Billy Peet and himself got a load of "truck" into town, only to be told that their man had made other arrangements. To meet these conditions Quidmore had spurts of energy, from which he backed down gibbering.
Taking his courage in both hands, the boy went to see Bertha. Never having been face to face with her before, he found her of the type of beauty best appreciated where the taste is for the highly blown. She received him with haughty surprise and wonder, not
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 asking him to sit down. Having prepared his words, he recited them, though her attitude frightened him out of the man-of-the-world tone he had meant to adopt. Humbly and haltingly, he asked if she wouldn't come out and help to stiffen the old man.
"So he's sent you, has he? Well, you can go back and say that I've no reply except the one I've given him. All is over between us. Tell him that if he thinks that that was the way to win me he's very gravely mistook. I know what's happened as positive as if I was a jury, and I shall never pardon it. Silence I shall keep, but that is all he can ask of me. He's made me talked about when he shouldn't ought to ov, ignoring that a woman, and especially a widow—" her voice broke—"has nothing but her reputation. Go back and tell him that if he tries to force my door he'll find it double-barred against him."
Tom went back but said nothing. There was no need for him to say anything, since his life began at once to take another turn.
School holidays having begun, he was free in fact as well as in name. It was on a Thursday that his father came to him with the kind of proposal which always excites a small boy.
"Say, boy, what you think of a little trip down to Wilmington, Delaware, you and me? Go off to-morrow and get back by Tuesday. I'd see my sister, and it'd do me good."
The prospect seemed to have done him good already. A new life had come to him. He went about the place giving orders for the few days of his absence, with particular instructions to Diggory and
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 Blanche as to Geraldine, and the disposal of the milk. They started on their journey in the morning.
It was one of those mornings in June when every blessed and beautiful thing seems poured on the earth at once. As between five and six Billy Peet drove them over to take the train at Harfrey, light, birds, trees, flowers, meadows, dew, would have thrilled them to ecstasy if they had not been used to them. For the first time in weeks Tom saw his father smile. It was a smile of relief rather than of pleasure, but it was better than his look of woe.
The journey wakened memories. Not since Mrs. Crewdson had brought him out to place him as a State ward with Mrs. Tollivant had he gone into the city by this route. He had gone in by the motor truck often enough; but this line that followed the river was haunted still by the things he had outlived. He was not sorry to have known them, though glad that they were gone. He was hardly sorry even for the present, though doubtful as to how it was going to turn out. Vaguely and not introspectively, he was shocked at himself, that he should be sitting there with a man who had done what he felt pretty sure this man had done, and that he should feel no horror. But he felt none. He assured himself of that. He could sleep with him by night, and work and eat with him by day, with no impulse but to shield a poor wretch who had made his own life such a misery.
"I've got to do it," he said to himself, in a kind of self-defense. "I don't know he did it—not for sure, I don't. And if nobody else tries to find out, why should I, when he's been so awful nice to me?"
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He watched a steamer plowing her way southward in the middle of the stream. He liked her air of quiet self-possession and of power. He wondered whence she was coming, whither she was going, and what she was doing it for. He couldn't guess.
"That'd be like me," he said, silently, "sailing from I don't know where—sailing to I don't know where——"
Ten years later he finished this thought, repeating exactly the same words. Just now he couldn't finish anything, because there was so much to see. Little towns perched above little harbors. Fishermen angled from little piers. A group of naked boys, shameless as young mermen, played in the water. On a rock a few yards from the shore a flock of gulls jostled each other for standing room. A motor boat puffed. Yachts rode sleepily at anchor. The car which, when they took it at Harfrey had been almost empty, was beginning to fill with the earlier hordes of commuters. Soon it was quite full. Soon there were cheery young people, most of them chewing gum, standing in the passageway. Having rounded the curve at Spuyten Duyvil, they saw the city loomi............