"They need be told only what you choose to have them know, but as to the bringing-out farce--that's rot! Those girls will get out by one door or another, never fear. _You_ are to be kept in--that's the important thing at present." "Dear old David!" Doris's eyes dimmed as she looked at the kind face bending over the hands lying limp, now, on her lap. She noticed that there was white on the temple where the dark hair had turned; the heavy shoulders were bent permanently. She longed to do something more for David during the next--twenty years! "You must not give way, Doris. A change is good for us all." Martin noted the tears in the eyes holding his own, but he did not understand their source. "I am afraid the girls will be so disappointed," was what Doris said. "Pampered creatures! It will do them good. But Nancy will love it and Joan can kick the traces if she wants to--that will do her good." Martin leaned back and crossed his legs in the old boyish way. "What will Nancy love, David?" "Why, the out-of-door country life. She's that kind. Flowers and animals and quiet." "Country life?" Doris sat up. "But, David, I could not stand country life, myself. I love to look at the country, listen to it, play with it--but I am a citizen to the core. It is simply impossible. One has to be born with the country in his blood to be part of it." It was like pleading with the stern expression on Martin's face. He was not apparently listening, and when he spoke he carried on his own thought: "Queer how things dovetail. We drop a stitch and then go back and pick it up--now there is that place of yours, down South, Ridge House!" Doris's face twitched and then, because she was in that state closely bordering upon the unknown, that state open to impressions and suggestions from sources outside the explainable, Silver Gap seemed to open alluringly to her imagination. It _was_ like a dropped stitch to be taken up and woven into the pattern! She suddenly felt that she had always known she must go back. It was like the heart trouble--a thing on her road! Doris smiled and David patted her hands. "That's the way it strikes me," he said, quite as if he were gaining his inspiration whence hers came. "After you told me about the--the children, you know, Doris, years ago, I went down there and gave the place a look-over. The South always affects me like a--well, a lotus flower--sleeping but filled with wonderful dreams. It gets me! Why, after seeing Ridge House I even went so far as to buy a piece of land known as Blowing Rock Clearing. I've planned, if that scamp of a nephew of mine ever develops into a sawbones, to leave him in charge here and go down South myself and put up a shack on my clearing." Martin was watching Doris now from under his brows; he was talking against the silence that might engulf her again; seeking to hold her to a future that he had been vaguely considering in the past. He thankfully saw her interest growing.