"Madam," said the young fellow, stooping to pick up his hat, and laughing
outright at his own blushes and confusion, "I don't wonder that my father
thinks so much of you!"
"I never did that to your father!" she retorted. Beneath the wrinkled ivory
of her skin a tinge of faintest pink appeared and disappeared.
Half and hour later she was sitting at a western window. Young John Gray had
gone to the library to write to his father and mother, announcing his
arrival; and in her lap lay his father's letter which with tremulous fingers
she was now wiping her spectacles to read. In all these years she had never
allowed herself to think of her John Gray as having grown older; she saw him
still young, as when he used to lean over the garden fence. But now the
presence of this son had the effect of suddenly pushing the father far on
into life; and her heart ached with this first realization that he too must
have passed the climbing-point and have set his feet on the shaded downward
slope that leads to the quiet valley.
His letter began lightly: "I send John to you with the wish that you will be to the son the same
inspiring soul you once were to the father. You will find him headstrong and
with great notions of what he is to be in the world. But he is warm-hearted
and clean-hearted. Let him do for you the things I used to do; let him hold
the yarn on his arms for you to wind off, and read to you your favourite
novels; he is a good reader for a young fellow. And will you get out your
spinning-wheel some night when the logs are in roaring in the fireplace and
let him hear its music? Will you some time with your hands make him a
johnny-cake on a new ash shingle? I want him to know a woman who can do all
things and still be a great lady. And lay upon him all the burdens that in
any way you can, so that he shall not think too much of what he may some day
do in life, but, of what he is actually doing. We get great reports of the
Transylvania University, of the bar of Lexington, of the civilization that I
foresaw would spring up in Kentucky; and I send John to you with the wish
that he hear lectures and afterward go into the office of some one whom I
shall name, and finally marry and settle there for life. You recall this as
the wish of my own; through John shall be done what I could not do. You see
how stubborn I am! I have given him the names of my school-children. He is
to find out those of them who still live there, and to tell me of those who
have passed away or been scattered.