by his sense of the common reluctance. No one wanted to go, so far as he
could make out, not even Ellen herself, when he tried to make her say she
wished it. Lottie was in open revolt, and animated her young men to a
share in the insurrection. Her older brother was kindly and helpfully
acquiescent, but he was so far from advising the move that Kenton had
regularly to convince himself that Richard approved it, by making him say
that it was only for the winter and that it was the best way of helping
Ellen get rid of that fellow. All this did not enable Kenton to meet the
problems of his younger son, who required him to tell what he was to do
with his dog and his pigeons, and to declare at once how he was to
dispose of the cocoons he had amassed so as not to endanger the future of
the moths and butterflies involved in them. The boy was so fertile in
difficulties and so importunate for their solution, that he had to be
crushed into silence by his father, who ached in a helpless sympathy with
his reluctance.

Kenton came heavily upon the courage of his wife, who was urging forward
their departure with so much energy that he obscurely accused her of
being the cause of it, and could only be convinced of her innocence when
she offered to give the whole thing up if he said so. When he would not
say so, she carried the affair through to the bitter end, and she did not
spare him some, pangs which she perhaps need not have shared with him.
But people are seldom man and wife for half their lives without wishing
to impart their sufferings as well as their pleasures to each other; and
Mrs. Kenton, if she was no worse, was no better than other wives in
pressing to her husband's lips the cup that was not altogether sweet to
her own. She went about the house the night before closing it, to see
that everything was in a state to be left, and then she came to Kenton in
his library, where he had been burning some papers and getting others
ready to give in charge to his son, and sat down by his cold hearth with