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It was the month of June; the trees were in full foliage; there was no longer any look of spring in the landscape, and the air and sky belonged to midsummer. Mrs. Israel Haydon had been dead nearly two months.
On a Sunday afternoon the father and son sat in two old splint-bottomed chairs just inside the wood-house, in the shade. The wide doors were always thrown back at that time of the year, and there was a fine view across the country. William Haydon could see his own farm spread out like a green map; he was scanning the boundaries of the orderly fences and fields and the stretches of woodland and pasture. He looked away at them from time to time, or else bent over and poked among the wood-house dust and fine chips with his walking-stick. "There's an old buckle that I lost one day ever so many years ago," he exclaimed suddenly, and reached down to pick it up. William was beginning to look stout and middle-aged. He held out the rusty buckle to his father, but Israel Haydon sat stiffly upright, and hardly gave a glance at the useless object.