I blushed because she had divined that I intended to tell him about her mother, but comforted myself with the reflection that she could not know for a certainty. My mother was waiting for us; and the place was so quiet and pleasant, and the late dinner she had prepared so good, that I began to feel like a very favored fellow. Jo and the man of the house were away somewhere, and we spent the afternoon like three happy children, suddenly free from some exacting restraint. Agnes and I made so much of my mother, that I remember her as being happier on that day than any other, and when I think of her now, so long after, I am glad that it is as she sat in her easy chair between us that afternoon, saying little, but looking content and happy. CHAPTER X. JO ERRING MAKES A FULL CONFESSION. Inasmuch as that young man continued to haul stone to Erring’s Ford for a dam, and would talk of nothing else, it became certain, in course of time, that Jo would never make a farmer; so it was agreed, at a convention attended by my father and my grandmother, that he should be apprenticed for two years to Damon Barker, of the establishment on Bull River. Barker had suggested it, I believe, as he needed some one to assist him, and was much pleased with Jo besides, who had already learned to help him in many ways during visits to the place. These visits were allowed to become frequent and protracted when it was decided that he should be sent there to learn milling as a business. When it was announced to Jo that the arrangement had been made--it was one Sunday afternoon--he took me out to the hayloft of the stable to talk about it. “I am to be given a chance,” he said, “and that is all I ask. I intend to work hard, and at the end of two years I shall be in position to commence my mill in earnest. I am seventeen years old now; I shall be nineteen then, and by the time I am twenty-one, ‘Erring’s Mill’ will be in operation. It seems a very long time to wait, and a big undertaking, but it is the best I can do.” He was lying on his back, looking through the holes in the roof at the sky, and I thought more than ever that he was brave and capable, and that he had always been treated unjustly in Fairview. I was thinking--it had not occurred to me before--that I should be very lonesome without him; and he seemed to be thinking of it, too, for he said:--