"Let's work, anyhow," he added, as his father said nothing. "Maybe we'll
think of something while we're building that railroad depôt. Don't you
suppose that now you've got so far the Motor would keep while you
taught, and you could go at it again in the vacations? That's an idea,
father, come now!"

He was already in his place before the board on which the little City
was built, and his eyes were fixed on the lines his father had drawn as
a plan for the station and the diverging tracks. But Overholt did not
sit down. His usual place was opposite the Motor, where he could see it,
but he did not want to look at it now.

"Change seats with me, boy," he said. "I cannot stand the sight of it. I
suppose I'm imaginative. All this has upset me a good deal."

He wished he had the lad's nerves, the solid nerves of hungry and
sleepy thirteen. Newton got up at once and changed places, and for a few
minutes Overholt tried to concentrate his mind on the little City, but
it was of no use. If he did not think of the Motor, he thought of what
was much worse, for the little streets and models of the familiar places
brought back the cruel memory of happier things so vividly that it was
torment. All his faculties of sensation were tense and vibrating; he
could hear his wife's gentle and happy voice, her young girl's voice,
when he looked at the little bench in the lane where he had asked her to
marry him, and an awful certainty came upon him that he was never to
hear her speak again on this side of the grave; there was the house they
had lived in; from that window he had looked out on a May morning at the
budding trees half an hour after his boy had been born; there, in the
pretty garden, the young mother had sat with her baby in the lovely June