"Where you do sleep, Bill?"
Billie colored at this. It was the first time anyone had ever called him Bill. He felt two feet taller all at once.
"In the little bed-room over the east 'ell,' sir."
"Change your belongings to the room next this. It faces the south and has two bookcases in it filled with my books that I had at college. You will enjoy them."
Billie went out softly, down the circular staircase to the lower hall and, once outdoors, on a dead run for the barn. Ben was husking corn on the barn floor, sitting on a milking stool with the corn rising around him in billows, whistling and singing alternately.
Billie poured out his news breathlessly, and Ben took it all calmly.
"Well, I'm glad for ye. I always believed the Judge would come out of his trance some day and do the proper thing. That Miss Roxy's a sightly woman. Knows just how to take hold. Guess she could marry the Judge tomorrow if she wanted to. Mrs. Robbins is a fine woman too. I never see her before."
Somehow this didn't seem to fit in with Billie's mood, and he left the barn. All the world looked different to him. He was wanted, really wanted, now. He wasn't just somebody the Judge had taken in because they were related and he had to out of pride. He was to have the big south chamber right next the Judge's own room and study all he wanted to. Best of all, since he had grasped that yellow old hand in his, he knew that he could go to him with anything and that he really was going to be a grandfather to him.
It was nearly two miles over to Greenacres if he went cross lots, but he started. The goldenrod was high and in full bloom on every hand and purple asters crowded it for room. The apple trees held ripening fruit, and the fragrance of Shepherd Sweetings and Peck's Pleasants was in the air. It was the last week in August when all the summerland seemed to rest after a good work done, and the hush of harvest time was on the earth.
In the woods he startled a doe and two fawns and they leaped ahead of him through the brush. Farther along in the pines a partridge whirred up under his nose almost, and coaxed him away from her young. Some young stock, Jersey heifers and a few Holsteins, grazed in the woods, and lifted grave eyes to watch him pass. Usually he would notice them, but today all he thought of was the Judge's words, and the longing to talk them over with somebody.