"Don't you force her to grow up too quick, however," urged Adam. "Such a far-seeing man as you must not come between her and her own generation, and keep her too close pent if you really go to the moor. Youth cleaves to youth, Jacob; youth be the natural food of youth."
"You're wrong there," answered the elder. "Youth's hard, narrow, ignorant and without heart. I want to get her away for her own sake. She's a flower too fair to live with weeds. She's her mother again. The rest are dross to her—workaday, coarse stuff, wishing me dead as often as they trouble to think on me at all."
Adam argued against this opinion and indeed blamed Bullstone heartily.
"Don't you be poisoned against your own," he said. "The hardness of youth isn't all bad. It often wears out and brings tenderness and understanding with experience. I'd never fear a hard youngster: it's the hardness of middle age that I'd fear."
And no distant day proved Adam to have spoken well. A certain thing fell out and Jacob remembered the other's opinion, for it seemed that Winter's prophecy came true quicklier than even he himself might have expected it to do so. On a certain Sunday in February their father received a visit from John Henry and Avis. The latter did not bring her husband, since the object of their visit proved purely personal to the family.
John Henry drove his sister in a little market cart from Bullstone Farm and they surprised their father walking by the river. Auna accompanied him and they were exercising some puppies. He had just pointed out to the flat rock by the river where Margery was wont to sit, when she took vanished generations of puppies for their rambles; then Auna cried out and the cart stopped beside them.
John Henry alighted to shake hands with his father and Avis descended and kissed him. He was astonished and asked the meaning of their visit.
"You'll catch it from Mrs. Huxam, playing about on Sunday," he said.
"We're not playing about," answered John Henry, "we've come on a very important, family matter—our affair and not grandmother's at all. And we thought we might stop for dinner and tea."
"Come and welcome; but I've done all I'm going to do, John Henry—all for you and all for Avis. You're not going to squeeze me any more."