"I have accepted."
The friends were silent with their faces turned in the same direction across the country—their land, the land of generations of their people. This breaking up would be the end for them of the near tie of soil and tradition and boyhood friendship and the friendship of manhood.
"Well," said the doctor unsteadily, "this is what you have been working for."
"This is what I have been working for," assented Professor Ousley.
These intermediate years had wrought their changes in him also; within and without; he was grown heavy, and as an American scholar he had weight. The doctor clung for safety to his one theme:—
"You have outgrown your place here in Kentucky. A larger world has heard of you and sends for you because it needs you. Well done! But when I became a Kentucky country doctor, it was for life. No greater world for me! My only future is to try to do better the same work in the same place—always better and better if possible till it is over. You climb your mountain range; I stay in my valley."
Professor Ousley drew out another envelope:
"Read that," he said a little sadly, and sadness was rare with him: it was an advertisement for the town paper announcing for sale his house and farm.
"It is the beginning of the end," he said. "It is our farewell to Kentucky, to you, to our past, but not, I hope, to our future. Herbert and Elizabeth will have to be looked out for in the future: Elizabeth may refuse to leave the neighborhood, who knows?" He laughed with fatherly fondness and gentleness.
The doctor laughed with him: that plighting of their children!