"Well, your grandfather said I was needed at home, and so I stayed on until I met your father when I was eighteen. Then I married."
"And maybe if he'd let you be a teacher, you wouldn't have wanted to get married. I want to study all about trees and forestry and conservation, and I want to ride over miles and miles of forests that are all mine. I'm going to, too, some day."
"How old are you now, Piney?" asked Ralph.
"Going on sixteen."
"Maybe next year when I bring Honey home, we can coax Aunt Luella to take a trip out with you. How's that?"
Mrs. Hancock flushed delicately, and smiled up at her tall nephew.
"How you talk, Ralph. That would cost a sight of money."
"Well, I tell you, Aunt Luella," said Ralph, his hands deep in his pockets, as he leaned back against the high mantelpiece in the sitting-room, "I want to hand over Greenacres to you and the children. I haven't any feeling for it like you have, and it seems to me, after talking it over with Mr. Robbins, that it rightfully belongs to you. He would like to buy it, he says, inside of two or three years. They like it over there, and propose to stay here in Gilead, but if you want to take it over, I'm willing to transfer it before I go west."
It was said quietly and cheerfully, quite as if he were offering her a basket of fruit that she was partial to, and Luella Trowbridge Hancock sat back in her rocking-chair, staring up at him as if she could hardly believe her ears.
"Ralph, you don't mean you'd give up the place yourself? Why, whatever would I do with it? I love every inch of ground there and every blade of grass, but you see how it is. Honey's set on going west and Piney wants to go to college and I don't know what all. I couldn't live on there alone, and they haven't got the feeling for it that I have. The younger generation seems to have rooted itself up out of the soil somehow. I wouldn't know what to do with it after I'd got it, and I wouldn't take it away from Mrs. Robbins and the girls for anything. Why, they love it 'most as well as I do."