"My son—" said the colonel and couldn't go on. Then he did manage. "Aren't we going to live together?"
"Not yet," said Jeffrey. "Not yet."
The colonel had thought so much about his old age that now he was near saying: "You know I haven't so very many years," but he held on to himself.
"He's got to go alone," said Anne. "But he'll come back."
"Yes," said Lydia, from the habit they had learned of heartening Farvie, "he'll come back."
But she was hotly resolving that he should learn his duty and stay here. Let her get a word with him alone.
"What I'm going to do out there I don't know," said Jeffrey. "But I am going to work, and I'm going to turn in enough to keep you as you ought to be. I want to stay here a little while first."
The colonel was rejuvenated by delight. Lydia wondered how anybody could see that look on his face and not try to keep it there.
"I've got," said Jeffrey, "to write a book."
"Oh, my son," said the colonel, "that's better than I hoped. The newspapers have had it all, how you've changed the prison paper, and how you built up a scheme of prison government, and I said to myself, 'When he comes out, he'll write a book, and good will come of it, and then we shall see that, under Providence, my son went to prison that he might do that.'"