"If a man's only his own debtor he won't be very hard on himself," he said aloud, and laughed.

Old Margaret Bean, his housekeeper, looked at him over her spectacles, but she did not know what he meant.

She prepared many a valuable remedy for his cough from herbs and roots, but Lot would never taste them, and she made her old husband swallow them all as preventatives of colds, that they should not be wasted.
Lot was coughing harder lately.

To-night, after he returned from the Hautvilles', he had one paroxysm after another.

He did not go to bed, but huddled over the fire wrapped in a shawl, with a leather-bound book on his knees, all night, holding to his chest when he coughed, then turning to his book again.
When daylight was fully in the room he blew out the candle, and went over to the window and looked out across the road at the house opposite, which had always been called the "new house" to distinguish it from the old Gordon homestead.