comradeship in labor usually brings into consciousness again the
primeval bond of Man against Nature--the brotherhood, at least, of
the merely human. But while they had mingled their toil, sweat,
hopes, and disappointments, their minds had never met. The father
had never felt at home with his son; David, without knowing why--
and many a sorrowful hour it had cost him--had never accepted as
father the man who had brought him into the world. Each soon
perceived that a distance separated them which neither could cross,
though vainly both should try, and often both did try, to cross it.

As he sat in the chimney-corner to-night, his very look as he
watched the door made it clear that he dreaded the entrance of his
son; and to this feeling had lately been added deeper estrangement.

When David walked in, he took a seat in front of the fire. His
mother followed, bringing the sugar-bowl and the honey, which she
locked in a closet in the wall: the iron in her blood was
parsimony. Then she seated herself under the mantelpiece on the
opposite side and looked silently across at the face of her
husband. (She was his second wife. His offspring by his first wife
had died young. David was the only child of mature parents.) She
looked across at him with the complacent expression of the wife who
feels that she and her husband are one, even though their offspring
may not be of them. The father looked at David; David looked into
the fire. There was embarrassment all round.

"How are you feeling to-night, father?" he asked affectionately, a
moment later, without lifting his eyes.

"I've been suffering a good deal. I think it's the weather."