Jean was out of their hearing. Frowning slightly, with compressed lips, she bent over her work. She was sitting on the ground, her knees supporting her drawing board. The week before she had sent off five studies to Beth, and two of her very best ones down to Mr. Higgins. Answers had come back from both, full of criticism, but with plenty of encouragement, too. Mrs. Craig had read the two letters and given her eldest the quick impulsive embrace which ever since her childhood had been to Jean her highest reward of merit. But it was from her father, perhaps, that she derived the greatest happiness. He laid one arm around her shoulders, smiling at her with a certain whimsical speculation in his keen eyes.
“Well, my dear, if you will persist in developing such talent, we can’t afford to hide this light under a bushel. You should have more training.”
“But when?” interrupted Jean. “It isn’t that I want to know for my own pleasure, but you don’t know how fearfully precious these last years in my teens seem to me. There’s such a terrible lot of things to learn before I can really say I’ve finished.”
“And one of the first things you have to learn is just that you never stop learning. That you never really start to learn until you know your own limitations. Somewhere over there lies New York,” he said, looking down the valley. “Often through the past year, I have stood looking in that direction. I’ve got a job back there waiting—”
Jean interrupted, her face alight with gladness. “Oh, Dad, Dad, you do want to go back. You don’t know how afraid I’ve been that you’d take root up here and stay forever. I know it’s perfectly splendid, and it has been a place of refuge for us all, but now that you are getting to be just like your old self—”
Her father’s hand checked her.
“Steady there,” he warned. “Not quite so fast. I am still a little bit uncertain when I try to speed up. We’ve got to be patient a little while longer.”
Jean pressed his hand in hers and understood. If it had been hard for them to be patient, it had been doubly so for him, groping his way back slowly, the past year, on the upgrade to health.
Jean was thinking of their talk as she sat out in the orchard today, trying to catch some of the fleeting beauty of its blossom-laden trees.
“How are you getting along, dear?” asked a well-known voice behind her.