"Yes?" I said.
"You know my fondness for history," she continued. "I rather hoped I should see some day what I had read about so long—castles and things—and then, too, there were the novels I was fond of, like Lorna Doone. I always wanted to see the moors and the Doone Valley, and the water-slide that little John Ridd had found so slippery, when he first saw Lorna."
"You wanted to see England then," I said.
"Yes, England," she replied. "England, you know, was my father's country."
"The Doone Valley," I remarked, "would be Devon, wouldn't it?"
"Yes," she replied, "and it was Devon where father was a boy."
"And our old friend Robin Saxeholm came from Devon, you know," I said.
"So he did," she answered. Then we talked of Robin and his visit to Grassy Fordshire years ago, and what Letitia had forgotten of it I recalled to her, and what I could not remember, she supplied, so that it all came back to us like a story or a summer dream.
When she had gone up-stairs I sat for a long time smoking by the dying fire, and musing of some old-time matters which now came back to me in a clearer light. From thinking of my own youth, little by little, I came to Robin's—I mean the younger, who was now so soon to be a man. Tall and fair like the youth he was named for, though not red-haired, he had all but completed that little learning which is a "dangerous thing": he was a high-school senior now, and overwhelmed sometimes with the wonder of it, but a manly fellow for all that, one whom my eyes dwelt fondly on more often than he knew. In the spring-time he would have his parchment; college would follow in the fall—college! What could I do to give my son a broader vision of the universe, lest with only Grassy Ford behind him, he should think the outside world lay mostly within his college walls?
"You are going on a long journey."