“Why didn’t you?”
“Well, your grandfather said I was needed at home, and so I stayed on until I met your father when I was eighteen. Then I married.”
“And maybe if he’d let you be a teacher, you wouldn’t have wanted to get married. I want to study all about trees and forestry and conservation, and I want to ride over miles and miles of forests that are all mine. I’m going to, too, some day.”
“How old are you now, Sally?” asked Ralph.
“Practically sixteen. Fifteen and a half, anyway.”
“Maybe next year when I bring Buzzy home, we can coax Aunt Luella to take a trip out with you. How’s that?”
Mrs. Hancock flushed delicately, and smiled up at her tall nephew. “How you talk, Ralph. That would cost a sight of money.”
“Well, I tell you, Aunt Luella,” said Ralph, his hands deep in his pockets as he leaned back against the high mantelpiece in the living room. “I want to hand over Woodhow to you and the children. I haven’t any feeling for it like you have, and it seems to me, after talking it over with Mr. Craig, that it rightfully belongs to you. He’d like to buy it, he says, inside of two or three years. They like it over there, and plan to stay in Elmhurst, but if you want to take it over, I’m willing to transfer it before I go West.”
“Ralph, you don’t mean you’d give up the place yourself? Why, whatever would I do with it? I love every inch of ground there and every blade of grass, but you see how it is. Buzzy’s set on going West and Sally wants to go to college and I don’t know what all. I couldn’t live on there alone, and they haven’t got the feeling for it that I have. The younger generation seems to have rooted itself up out of the soil. I wouldn’t know what to do with it after I’d got it, and I wouldn’t take it away from the Craigs for anything. Why, they love it almost as much as I do.”
“I know, Aunt Luella, but I wanted you to have the opportunity to say yes or no,” answered Ralph. “Now, then, here’s the other way out. Supposing I make it over to you, and you have the rental money, and then sell it to Mr. Craig when he is able to take it over. You’d have the good of it then.”