Through the open door came a wonderful fragrance—as the fragrance of youthful love—blown in from the syringa bush beside the kitchen door. They must plant a syringa beside the kitchen door-step in the new home, thought Samuel. Out of the stillness, he spoke, his voice very husky. “You be a woman arter my own heart—I knowed it when I see you a-settin’ here a-hullin’ berries. It’s more than I ’spected. I never dreamed it could be: I was that old. But, Miss Ellie, you be—you be—” He lost his voice entirely for a space and fearfully, reverently, he lifted in his trembling fingers one of the silver-gold curls that lay on her neck, lifted it and immediately let it fall in place again. “You be,” he whispered, “a woman arter my own heart. I never found sech a one when I was young. I know it now, fer ef I had, I wouldn’t ’a’ been afeared of no bad luck fer neither her ner me. I’d a took her an’—” another pause and then with brave, masculine assurance, “she’d ’a’ took me.” Miss Ellie did not move, she did not speak. She felt that his voice was very far away, away off back in her youth where she had dreamed of the mate who was yet to come. Closer she pressed her cheek to the baby’s and so assured herself that baby and the man who had brought her the baby were real and belonged to today. Samuel was speaking again, his hand now on the back of her chair, so that it brushed against the ruffle that ran across the shoulders of her apron. “I allers wanted children, an’ when I got too old to have the hope o’ ever a-marryin’, I used ter say ter myself: ‘Oh, ef they was only leetle grand-younguns now!’ Then the fortune come. Says I fust thing: ‘I’ll have a baby. I’ll be a granddaddy yit.’ Thar wa’n’t much mean about me. I be sixty-nine, but I wanted my own home, an’ my own wife, an’ my own baby. But I wanted the baby most of all. So the fust thing I done when the money come was ter go to that thar Margaret Jane Orphan Asylum an git this here baby. He hadn’t been there but a week. Jest lost his grandma an’ his grandpa—didn’t yer, yer pore leetle cuss, yer? He’s legally adopted. His name is Samuel Biggs Jessup, Jr. Ain’t he a wallopin’ fine feller!” Samuel exploded at the last. His bashfulness, his self-depreciation, his afraidness, were all gone. He bent over, his hands on his knees, and looked into the baby’s face. The baby’s face was very close to Ellie’s. The baby’s face was dimpled and smiling, while over Ellie’s face there was a flush of joyous young motherhood together with the proud, all-wondering delight of grandmotherhood, and blending with both, a sweet shame and shrinking such as no one but a virgin can wear. Oh, exquisite, young-old Miss Ellie! Your eyes swimming in unshed tears were so beautiful then with the inner light that Samuel blinked to see them. “Miss Ellie,” he whispered. Very still was the kitchen. The syringa outside the door shook out its perfume just for these two. The wind murmured through the fragrant flowers—it murmured: