“This is a very great pleasure to me, I assure you, Miss Aydelot,” Horace Carey replied, grasping her hand.
Inside the house everything was as well appointed as the outside suggested. As the doctor was making himself more presentable after his long journey, he realized that the pretty, old-fashioned bedroom had evidently been a boy’s room once, Asher Aydelot’s room. And with a woman’s loving sentiment, neither Asher’s mother nor the present owner had changed it at all. The petals of a pink rose of the wallpaper by the old-styled dresser were written over in a boyish hand and the doctor read the names of “Jim and Alice,” and “Asher and Nell.”
“Old sweethearts of ’the Kerry Dancing’ days,” he thought to himself.
From the open window he looked out upon the magnificence of the autumn forests and saw the white pike road leading down to Clover Creek and the church spires and courthouse tower above the trees.
“The heir to all this comfort and beauty gave it up because he didn’t want to be a tavern-keeper here, and because he did want a girl—Virginia!” Horace Carey said the name softly. “I know what her jessamine-draped window looked out upon. I hardly realized when I was here before what Asher’s early home had been. Yet those two for love of each other are building their lives into the life of their chosen State. It is the tiller of the soil who must make the West. But how many times in the lonely days 160 in that little sod cabin must they have remembered their childhood homes! How many times when the hot fall winds swept across the dead brown prairie have their memories turned to the beauty of the October days here in the East! Oh, well, the heroes weren’t all killed at Lexington and Bunker Hill, nor at Bull Run and Gettysburg. Some of them got away, and with heroic wives went out to conquer the plains from the harsh rule of Nature there.”
When the doctor went downstairs again, a little girl met him, saying, “Miss Jane says you may sit in the parlor, or out on the meranda, till supper is ready.”
“How pleasant! Won’t you come and sit with me?” Doctor Carey replied.
“I must put the—the lap-robes on the tables to everybody’s plate, and the knives and forks and poons. Nen I’ll come,” she answered.
Carey sat on the veranda enjoying the minutes and waiting for the little girl.
“What is your name?” he asked when she appeared, and climbed into Miss Jane’s vacant chair.