This brought a laugh.
"What would you have a country farmhouse but a country farmhouse?"
"Oh well, Louise, you know what I mean."
If she did she kept the knowledge in silence; and her young sister, after regarding her with a curious look for a moment, drew a heavy sigh.
"It doesn't seem to me that you belong to country farmhouses," she said boldly, "with your education and talents. What will you do with them buried among commonplace—hills?" She had nearly said people, but checked herself. "Why should Lewis hide himself in that out-of-the-way place?"
"Well, dear, you know it is a question of health with him. Nearly all his plans in life had to be changed to meet the demands of a failing body. Farm life agrees with him."
"I don't believe it will with you. I don't like to think of you away off there, miles away from anything to which you are accustomed. Louise, honestly, aren't you afraid you will be homesick?"
Thus solemnly questioned, Louise dropped her engrossing paper, and turning from the trunk, gave the questioner the full benefit of her laughing eyes.
"My dear little grandmother, have you gone and gotten your yourself into a fever of anxiety over your young and giddy sister? I'm not a bit afraid of a farmhouse. As for homesickness, of course I shall have that disease. What sort of a heart would it be that could leave such a home as mine without longing for it, and the dear faces that belong to it, sometimes many times a day? But having looked at the matter fairly, it seems to be the right thing to do. And, my troubled little sister, you want to fully realize this. I am not going 'away off there' alone, but with Lewis Morgan; and if I did not love him enough to be absolutely certain that I could go to the ends of the earth with him as well as not, if it should seem best to do so, I assuredly ought not to marry him."
"And leave papa and mamma!"