"How are you the one?" Brother inquired practically.
"Why Uncle Wesley that ran away to sea—I used to have his room, just over the kitchen, and many a time I've climbed down the side porch just as he did, and run away fishing—Uncle Wesley died in England, last year, and left me considerably more than he'd ever have made if he'd minded grandmother and studied to be a parson. It seems Uncle Rob knew where he was all the time, and wrote him, before he was sick himself, to leave the money to the family, and by George, he did.
"Lots of the old stuff is there—the sideboard and the library table and grandfather's old desk mother kept the preserves in.
"I used to lie on an old sofa in the dining-room on hot afternoons, waiting for it to get cool, reading some travel book, eating summer apples, and listening to Win and Thea practicing duets in the parlor. Lord, I can hear 'em now! I'd look out at the brick walls, hot, you know, in the sun, and the pear tree, with the nurse rocking Babe under it, and old Annie shelling peas by the kitchen door, and it all seemed so comfortable—"
His eyes were half closed. The children listened dreamily, huddled against him; low red rays crept down from the west-bound sun and struck the little pond to copper, the nickel dishes to silver, the lady's skirt to a peach-colored glory; a little sudden breeze set the red bottle tinkling between the stones. But to the group entranced with memories so vivid that reality blurred before them, the peach and copper glories were ripe fruit against an old brick wall, the tinkle echoed from an old piano in a dim, green-shuttered parlor, and the soft snoring of the General, asleep on the silk motor coat, was the drowsy breathing of a contented little fellow in knickerbockers dreaming in a window seat.
"Did you ever go to Atlantic City?"
The lady's voice woke them as a gong wakes a sleeper. "Now that's my idea of the country!"
He stared at her vaguely.
"But—but that's no place for children," he protested. He had hardly grown up at that moment, himself.
She shrugged her shoulders.