It was the bad management and the constantly growing stress of straitened circumstances that so worried Jonathan.
Then, two years before we young folks came home to live at the old Squire's, Aunt Anice, as the neighbors called her, died suddenly of a sharp attack of pleurisy.

That left Jonathan alone in the household of his son and family.

He seemed, so the old Squire told me later, to lose heart entirely after that, and sat about or wandered over the farm in a state of constant discontent.
I fear, too, that his grandson, Tom, was not an unmixed comfort to him.
Tom did not mean to hurt his grandfather's feelings.

He was a good-hearted boy, but impetuous and somewhat hasty.

More than once we heard him go on to tell what great things he meant to do at home, "after grandpa dies." Grandpa, indeed, may sometimes have heard him say that; and it is the saddest, most hopeless thing in life for elderly people to come to see that the younger generation is only waiting for them to die.
If Grandpa Edwards had been very infirm, he might not have cared greatly; but, as I have said, at sixty-seven he was still hale and, except for a little rheumatism, apparently well.
Tom came home from the Corners that night without having learned anything of Grandpa Edwards's whereabouts.