"So I have gathered," commented Marsh.
". . . and whenever any friends of his go on travels, they are always asked to bring back some philological information about the region where they go."
He turned to Marise (how sweet she looked in that thin yellow dress). "Where do you want your personally conducted to begin, dear?" he asked her. (Lord! How good it seemed to get back to Marise!)
Mr. Bayweather cut in hastily, "If I may be permitted to suggest, I think a history of the mill would be advisable as a beginning. I will be glad to tell the newcomers about this. I've just been working the subject up for a chapter in history of Ashley."
Neale caught an anguished side-glance from Marise and sent back to her a shrugged message of helplessness in the face of Destiny. The man didn't live who could head old Bayweather off when he got started on local history. And besides, this would give him time to get those last three letters finished. Aloud he said, "I wouldn't dare say a word about history in Mr. Bayweather's presence. I have a few letters to finish. I'll just step into the outer office and be ready to start when you've heard the history lecture." He turned to the children, who were tapping on the typewriter. "Look here, kids, you'd be better off where you won't break anything. Get along with you out into the mill-yard and play on the lumber-piles, why don't you? Paul, you see if you can tell yellow birch from oak this time!"
He and the children beat a retreat together into the outer office, where he bent over Arthur's desk and began to dictate in a low voice, catching, as he did so, an occasional rotund phrase from the disquisition in the other room. ". . . the glorious spirit of manly independence of the Green Mountain Boys . . ."
To himself Neale thought, "He'd call it bolshevism if he met it today . . ."
". . . second building erected in the new settlement, 1766, as a fort. . . . No, no, Mr. Marsh, not against the Indians! Our early settlers here never had any trouble with the Indians."
Neale laughed to himself at the clergyman's resentment of any ignorance of any detail of Ashley's unimportant history.
". . . as a fort against the York State men in the land-grant quarrels with New Hampshire and New York, before the Revolution." Neale, smiling inwardly, bet himself a nickel that neither of the two strangers had ever heard of the Vermont land-grant quarrels, and found himself vastly tickled by the profound silence they kept on the subject. They were evidently scared to death of starting old Bayweather off on another line. They were safe enough, if they only knew it. It was inconceivable to Mr. Bayweather that any grown person should not know all about early Vermont history.