"Perhaps you don't appreciate tapestries," said Mrs. Burgoyne, with her twinkling smile. "You know there is a popular theory that such things keep money in circulation."
"You know there's hardly any form of foolishness or vice of which you can't say that," he reminded her soberly; and Mrs. Burgoyne, serious in turn, answered quickly:
"Yes, you're quite right. It's too bad; we American women seem somehow to have let go of everything real, in the last few generations. But things are coming around again." She rose from the steps, still facing the village. "Tell me, who is my nearest neighbor there, in the white cottage?" she demanded.
"I am," Barry said unexpectedly. "So if you need—yeast is it, that women always borrow?"
"Yeast," she assented laughing. "I will remember. And now tell me about trains and things. Listen!" Her voice and look changed suddenly: softened, brightened. "Is that children?" she asked, eagerly.
And a moment later four children, tired, happy and laden with orchard spoils, came around the corner of the house. Barry presented them as the Carews—George and Jeanette, a bashful fourteen and a self-possessed twelve, and Dick, who was seven—and his own small dusty son, Billy Valentine, who put a fat confiding hand in the strange lady's as they all went down to the gate together.
"You are my Joanna's age, Jeanette," said Mrs. Burgoyne, easily. "I hope you will be friends."
"Who will I be friends with?" said little Billy, raising blue expectant eyes. "And who will George?"
"Why, I hope you will be friends with me," she answered laughing; "and I will be so relieved if George will come up sometimes and help me with bonfires and about what ought to be done in the stable. You see, I don't know much about those things." At this moment George, hoarsely muttering that he wasn't much good, he guessed, but he had some good tools, fell deeply a victim to her charms.
Mrs. Carew came out of her own gate as they came up, and there was time for a little talk, and promises, and goodbyes. Then Barry took Mrs. Burgoyne to the station, and lifted his hat to the bright face at the window as the train pulled out in the dusk. He went slowly to his office from the train and attacked the litter of papers and clippings on his desk absent-mindedly. Once he said half aloud, his big scissors arrested, his forehead furrowed by an unaccustomed frown, "We were only kids then; and they all thought I was the one who was going to do something big."