She smiled to Peter in the way that he liked to have her smile at him.
"For that, you follow the main road past the ancestor on up the hill. Turn in between two great stone pillars and keep along a winding drive which gives you glimpses of herds grazing, and you will come to another simple frame house. Then keep along another drive on that little farm past screens of larches and the garage and you will come to the stables and the dairy and the barns."
"Right!" said Peter. "By George! I believe it's time I enlarged that house or built a new one, or the big barn will get ashamed of it."
The two white heads of Truckleford felt that they, too, knew Longfield. Their promise was given that one day they would undertake that formidable journey from their insular home across the Atlantic and taste Virginia ham and sweet corn on their native heath. Peter had told them how he would send them spinning over the highways to the suburbs of Boston, to Cape Cod and the White Mountains, and skirting the gleaming silver of the Hudson to Manhattan, where the skyscrapers rise from their granite beds.
Only the presence of Bricktop was needed to round out this dinner party at the vicarage; but he was too busy in France making the relatives and the sweethearts of other maimed men rejoice, to accept any invitations.
"I was backing Phil," Peter mused, after he had lighted his cigar; and, as Bill Hurley had repeatedly said, Peter was "nobody's fool."
"Phil ain't, either," Bill concluded, after he saw the girl that Phil brought home from the wars.
THE END