“If it were not for the children,” he went on slowly. “They are all at an age now when they need the advantages of being near the city.”
“Well, I’m not so sure of that,” answered Becky dubiously. “I suppose you feel that you can do more for them down here, Tom, and it is a beautiful place to live, but you did pretty well yourself up at the old Green District, didn’t you?”
He smiled and nodded his head.
“I wonder what Margie would say to the Green District schoolhouse?” he asked. A vision of it arose out of the memories of the past, the little red schoolhouse that stood at the crossroads, with rocky pastures rising high behind it, and the long white dusty road curving before it. He had been just a country boy, born and bred within a few miles of Maple Grove at the old Craig homestead. He knew every cow path through the woods around Elmhurst, every big chestnut and hickory tree for five miles around, every fork and bend in the course of the wild little river that cut through the valley meadows. Somehow, in these days of weakness and fear that he was losing his grip on life, there had grown a great yearning to be home again, to find himself back in the shelter of the protecting hills. They had always been the hills of rest to him as a boy. He had often turned his thoughts to them longingly while he sloshed through jungles in the Pacific, but now they beckoned to him even more urgently to come back to peace and health.
“She isn’t country-bred, is she, Tom?”
The question called him to reality from his dreams. “No,” he answered gently, “no, Margie’s from California. I believe her people went out originally from New York State, but she herself was born in San Diego. Later, she lived on her father’s ranch for a while in the Coronado Valley, but she was educated in the city. She doesn’t know anything about farm life as we do.”
Rebecca looked nonplussed. California might just as well be Borneo, so far as her knowledge of it was concerned. It did seem rather too bad that Margie had come from such far-off stock, but still, she thought, a great deal could be excused in her on account of it, since it wasn’t given to everybody to be born in New England.
“Would she mind it just for a summer, do you suppose?”
“It would have to be for a longer time than one summer, Becky.”
Something in his voice made her suspicious. Mrs. Craig had walked out to meet the girls on their way home from the movies. A lone adventurous fly crept up the window curtain and Rebecca promptly slapped him with a ready hand.