"Bother!" said Jim regretfully; "it's always lesson-time just as I'm really occupied. I wish I was a grown-up and could do what I liked."
The old man did not contradict him with a well-worn platitude, because he knew that in the way the child meant grown-ups did have a great deal of freedom.
"You wouldn't like to be as old as I am, would you, Jim?" he asked. Jim regarded him thoughtfully; evidently this was the first time he had even imagined such a thing ever being possible. He cast about in his mind to think of some answer that would not hurt his grandfather's feelings.
"Well, perhaps not quite as old as you, Granpa!" he said; "as old as
Daddy; not with white hair like you—just a grown-up man."
"Jim …!" came the voice again more insistently, and his mother appeared at the back door and stood framed in its arch of carved granite. Marjorie Ruan was still a fine young woman; her thirty-odd years sat lightly upon her. Her tanned skin and the full column of her long, bare throat gave her a look of exuberant health. She was dressed in a smart suit of white linen and her brown head was bare.
"Have you been having a ride?" she asked. "But you mustn't stop when I call you, you know! You shouldn't keep him when he ought to come, Granpa!" The grandfather remained unperturbed. He liked and admired Marjorie, but there were times when he considered her manners left something to be desired. Jim ran into the house, and Marjorie, shepherding him in with a sweeping motion of her strong, big arm, disappeared also, curved a little over him. Ishmael was left alone in the yard, stroking the velvet-soft muzzle of the waiting horse.
Ishmael made a fine figure as he stood there, a little stooped, but handsome in his thin old way, with his strongly-modelled nose and his dark hazel eyes deep-set beneath the shaggy white brows. He was clean-shaven, and the fine curve of his jaw, always rather pointed than heavy, gave a touch of the priestly which looked oddly alien with his loose Norfolk jacket and corduroy breeches and the brown leather gaiters that protected his thin old legs. His close-cropped grey head was uncovered, and he still carried it well; he looked his years, but bore them bravely, nevertheless.
"You are going to finish sowing the four-acre to-day?" he asked the man who came out from a shed leading another horse. "I shall come along myself later on. Mind you regulate the feed of the drill carefully; it's not been working quite well lately." He stood watching a moment while the man harnessed the horses to the big drill, which, standing quiescent now, was soon to rattle and clank over the ploughed and harrowed earth of the four-acre field. Then he turned, and, going through the house, went out on to the lawn, where on a long chair in the sun, carefully swathed in shawls, an old lady was lying.
"Have you everything you want, Judy?" he asked, sitting slowly down on the garden-chair beside her. She looked up at him through the large round spectacles, that gave her an air as of a fairy godmother in a play, and nodded. "Everything, thanks! Marjorie has been very good. My knitting—which I always take about with me, because I think it's only decent for an old lady to knit, not because I can do it well, for I can't; to-day's Western Morning News and yesterday's Times; and my writing-pad, if I should take it into my head to write letters, which I shan't, because, as you know, I think letters are thoroughly vicious. One of the few signs of grace about the present generation is the so-called decay of the art of letter-writing."
"Jim would agree with you. He has just had to go in to his lessons; and he thinks that letters are a lot of rot, anyway!"