between the roadway and the waterway, and tramps and beggars and peddlers
advanced daily in a steady and disconcerting phalanx, and bolts and bars
and chains and gratings and eternal vigilance were all required to keep
mine from becoming thine; until, in the year of grace 1893, the Marshalls
had almost come to realize that they were living solitary and in a state
of siege. But they had never yet thought of capitulation nor of retreat;
they were the Old Guard; they were not going to surrender, nor to die
either.

As the advance guard of all, old David Marshall frequently occupied the
most advanced bastion of all, the parlor bay-window. Here, in the
half-dark, he was accustomed to sit and think; and his family let him sit
and think, unconscious that it would sometimes be a kindness to break in
upon the habit. He pondered on the markets and on the movements of trade;
he kept one eye for the shabby wayfarers who threw a longing look upon
his basement gratings, and another for the showers of sparks and black
plumes of smoke which came to remind him of corporate encroachments upon
municipal rights. And here one evening he sat, some few days after his
son's return, while a hubbub of female voices came to him from the next
room. His sister-in-law from three miles down the street, and his married
daughter from ten miles out in the suburbs, had come to show some
civility to the returned traveller, and the conjunction of two such stars
was not to be effected in silence. Nor was silence to be secured even by
a retreat from one room to another.

"Well, pa, you _are_ here, sure enough." A hand pulled aside the curtain
and made the bay-window a part of the parlor again. "Poking off by
yourself, and thinking--I know. When I've told you so many times not to."

It was Jane. It was her office to keep the family from disintegration.