"I'm working up a class of customer who can be trusted to pay for the best, which is all they want. Such people are only to be got by accident, and I catch 'em with patterns. They are passing by perhaps, and never thinking of the class of fruit I sell, when they just glance in, expecting to see the usual dreary piles of apples and mounds of nuts and so on; but instead—well, you've only got to look in the window yourself. And I change it all every second or third day. Don't I, Jane? I've got a mind for designing really, and I feel sometimes it's a thousand pities I wasn't taught the designer's art."
Customers interrupted Jeremy and they left him for the post-office. Jacob came to do an act of kindness and was interested to hear how his father-in-law would take it, He called it a 'Christmas box' and, under that name, he had offered Barlow an acre of good land with a road frontage, a quarter of a mile north of the railway station. It was a site in every way worthy of the habitation Mr. Huxam proposed to erect during the following spring.
He had not seen Jacob since receiving this gift by letter, and now he declared himself as absolutely unable to accept anything so great.
"We all know you for a very generous man," said Barlow, "and this I'll so far meet you as to do: I'll pay what you paid for the land, which still leaves me and my wife very much in your debt. Because the ground to-day is worth double what you spent upon it ten years ago."
Jacob, however, would not budge.
"It's to be all, or none," he said. "You must take my gift my way—that I insist. Only a small mind grudges to receive gifts, and I know you're large minded enough for anything."
"I am," confessed Barlow. "As I said to Judy when your letter came, 'this is the sort of seemly act which may well happen between a man and his son-in-law.' And needless to say that all we have, my wife and me, will go to Jeremy and Margery and their children, when we have no more need for it. In this case, if it is to go through, we should leave the villa residence to Margery."
"That's your affair," answered Jacob. "It's an idea altogether outside my scheme of things, though perhaps not hers."
Then Mrs. Huxam appeared. She was not emotional on the subject of the land, but dwelt on other aspects of the new house and the great changes entailed by retirement. Then Margery brought her back to the gift and insisted on some expression concerning it. Judith, however, proved exceedingly dry. She was consistent in her famous conviction: that nothing happens outside the purpose of an all-seeing and all-loving Creator.
"I am quite pleased about it," she said. "When the Lord wills a thing, it's always a great joy to weak, human nature if they thing appeals to us and we can accept it in a humble, human spirit without having to call upon faith. As a rule, when God acts nowadays, so faulty have our natures grown to be, that it generally demands great trust and faith to see He is right; but when I heard Jacob had given us that parcel of nice, sloping land under the plantations, I said, 'Good!' I was glad for my husband, but I was still gladder for Jacob, because we all know it's more blessed to give than receive. We envy his power of giving and hope to be spared to practise it. Meanwhile, to receive is very good discipline for my husband and me."