“You will, I am sure.  Let us go to the mills.”

John hesitated before he asked, “Could not I have, sir, a few days with Aunt Ann at the Cape?”

“No, I shall want you here.”

John was silent and disappointed.  The Squire saw it.  “It can’t be helped—­I do not feel able to be alone.  Leila will be away a year more and you will be gone for several years.  For your sake and mine I want you this summer.  Take care!  You lost a stirrup when Dixy shied.  Oh! here are the mills.  Good morning, McGregor.  All well?”

“Yes, sir.  Tom has gone to the city.  He is to be in the office of a friend of mine this summer.  I shall be alone.”

“John goes to West Point this September, Doctor.”

“Indeed!  You too will be alone.  Next it will be Leila.  How the young birds are leaving the nests!  Even that slow lad of Grace’s is going.  He is to learn farming with old Roberts.  He has a broad back and the advantage of not being a thinking-machine.”

“He may have made the best choice, McGregor.”

“No, sir,” said the Doctor, “my son has the best of it.”

John laughed.  “I don’t think I should like either farm or medicine.”

“No,” returned the Doctor, with his queer way of stating things, “there must be some one to feed the people; Tom is to be trained to cure, and you to kill.”

“I don’t want to kill anybody,” said John, laughing.

“But that is the business you are going to learn, young man.”  John was silent.  The idea of killing anybody!

“Heard from Mrs. Penhallow lately?” asked the doctor.

“No, but from Leila to-day; and, you will be surprised, from Josiah too.”

“Is that so?”

“Yes.  Give him the two letters, John.  Let me have them to-morrow, Doctor.  Good-bye,” and they rode on to the mills.

“It is a pity, John, Josiah gave no address,” said Penhallow,—­“a childlike man, intelligent, and with some underlying temper of the old African barbarian.”  The summer days ran on with plenty of work for John and without incidents of moment, until the rector went away as was his habit the first of August, more moody than usual.  If the rectory were finished, he would go there in September, and Mrs. Ann had written to him about the needed furniture.

On August 20th that lady wrote from Cape May that she must go home, and Leila that her aunt was well but homesick.  The Squire, who missed her greatly, unreluctantly yielded, and on August 25th she was met at the station by Penhallow and John.  To the surprise of both, she had brought Leila, as her school was not to begin until September 10th.

“My dear James,” cried Mrs. Ann, “it is worth while to have been away to learn how good it is to get home again.  I thought I would surprise you with Leila.”  As the Squire kissed her, Leila and the maid came from the car to the platform loaded with bundles.