Things had been better for her after the children began to come, but they had also been worse. The gardens had grown fuller for her, after their arrival, but they had grown no larger. Moreover, the increasing family had put a stop to any chance of retirement as well as to the occasionally-discussed project of “setting up for ourselves.” Money had continually grown tighter. With each fresh child that appeared, they were forced to “plough a furrow nearer the fence.” Yet if it was the children who in the first instance had closed the door to escape, it was the children who in the long run had thrown it open. One by one, as they grew up, they had all of them left the gardens. They had loved them,--all, perhaps, except Ellen,--just as they loved their parents; but they had left them, nevertheless. Something of their mother’s longing for space must have entered into them at birth, making it impossible for them to remain. And not only had they found the gardens too small, but England itself, so that they had allowed Canada to swallow them up, as it swallowed so many. It was not long, however, before they began to regret this wholesale snapping of ties. Not only did they get together as soon as possible on the other side, but, the moment they were on their feet, they wrote, urging their parents to join them. Sometimes it was Luke who wrote, and sometimes Joe; Maggie, sometimes, and sometimes Ellen. Later on, when they were all married, the boys’ wives wrote, too, and the girls’ husbands; and, later still, it was the grandchildren who, with their first handling of a pen, added their unsteady scrawls to the general petition. It was really the grandchildren who had beaten him in the end.... IV All the same, a long time had elapsed before he had finally given in. He was middle-aged and over even when the letters first began to come, and he had not felt able to face the venture. Mattie was all agog for it, of course, seeing it as the chance for which she had waited all her life, but he refused to consider it. He had said “no” so often, indeed, that it had seemed as if he could go on saying it for ever. But he had not gone on saying it for ever, or anything like it. Quite suddenly he had blotted out all those accumulated “noes” with a single “yes.” Yet, perhaps, now that he came to think of it, it had not been as sudden as he imagined. It seemed to him now, looking back, that the “noes” had had no significance at all; that, in point of fact, he had been defeated from the very start. Right from that first occasion upon which he had found his wife upstairs, pushing the walls away, he had known that he would go....