John flung the things into his bag.
"I wish you wouldn't encourage her, Mater," he exclaimed.
She came across the room to him. She took his hands that clumsily were folding some garment before he could pack it. She forced him to turn his face to hers.
"It's just as much that she encourages me," she said. "Do you know I was jealous of her once?"
He guffawed with laughter and took her face in his hands and kissed her between the eyes.
"I was," she whispered, her voice made more than tender with that kiss. "When she first took your thoughts a moment from me, that day you met her when we were making hay in the Highfield meadow, I was jealous then. Now we have one thing, so closely in common that, though she's only sixteen and I'm forty-seven we've become inseparable friends."
"What do you mean, one thing in common?"
"The old John."
For an instant she gave lease to her emotion and gently clung to him.
"That was the young John," she added in a whisper, "the little boy with the mop of hair who was a pirate captain and a Claude Duval and a hundred sturdy men all contained, John, in the simplest, sweetest mind that held one thought. It was to be a man like Mr. Peverell and till the soil with labor from sunrise to the sunset, a man like Mr. Peverell who owed no thanks to any, but out of his own heart and with his own energy made his pride, a man like Mr. Peverell who gave all that he had to the earth which gave all back again to him."