"Well, Roger," Grandma spoke softly with a hint of tears in her voice, "we have waited years, you and I, for a message from her, a heart message. And now it has come—it has come. She has sent us her boy."
"Yes," breathed Roger Allan, "she has sent us the message—she has sent me her son."
They knew, these two, why he had come. It may be that even the tall young man whose father and mother were sleeping the long sleep in far-off India may have guessed why in the end the frail but still lovely mother had begged him to go back to Green Valley, to its sweet old homes and warm-hearted folk. To bring comfort and find it—that had been the little mother's plan.
He believed he would find it. The loneliness that had tired him so ever since his mother slipped away was no longer a sharp, never silent pain, a great emptiness, but rather a sweet sorrow that was almost a friend.
He slept in the big airy room with its patchwork quilt of blue and white, its rugs and curtains to match, and looked at pictures of his mother. From the windows he watched the sun rise and shine on the merry little hills and the yellow road that wound up to his mother's old home. As he breathed in the wine of the spring mornings he comprehended the great hunger, the wild longing, that at times must have overwhelmed the little mother in those last days in India. And he thought he understood those last words of hers.
"Son, you must stay with your father as long as he needs you. But when that duty is over you must go back to the little green town on the other side of the world. Your father and I brought a message to India. You must take one back to my people. Oh, you will love it—you will love it—the little dear town full of friends and everywhere the fragrance of home. Oh, there are many there who will love you for my sake and who will make up to you for—me."
Her hand caressed his hair and her voice trailed off into a sigh for she knew what he didn't, wouldn't believe—that she was never to see that little green town across the gray-green ocean waves.
At the very last she had whispered:
"Oh, Boy of Mine, when you go home greet them all for me. And if ever you go to rummaging about in the attic remember you must never open the square trunk with the brass nail heads unless Mary Wentworth is there to explain. Tell Mary I love her and that I am not sorry. She will understand."
So as he looked out of Grandma Wentworth's upstairs windows he remembered those last talks and understood that yearning for home. When he had been in Green Valley only a few weeks the old life began to grow vague and unreal. The mother was real and near. But the splendid figure of his father was fading into a strange memory. He was a father to be proud of, that strong, cool, selfless man who had asked nothing of life but to take what it would of him.