“By George!” he thought.  “They forgot the ring!” Scowling, he tried to remember.  Yes, in the brief simple service that day, in which so much had been omitted—­music, flowers, wedding gown—­even the ring had been left out.  Why?  Not from any principle, he knew that they were not such fools.  No, they had simply forgotten it, in the haste of getting married at once.  Well, by thunder, for a girl whose father had been a collector of rings for the best part of his natural life, it was pretty shabby to say the least!  Then he recollected that he, too, had forgotten it.  And this quieted him immediately.

“I’ll get one, though,” he promised himself.  “And no plain wedding ring either.  I’ll make A. Baird attend to that.  No, I’ll get her a ring worth while.”

He sank deep in his chair and took peace to his soul by thinking of the ring he would choose.  And this carried his thoughts back over the years.  For there had been so many rings....

CHAPTER XXXVIII

It was a clear beautiful afternoon toward the end of May.  And as the train puffing up the grade wound along the Connecticut River, Roger sat looking out of the window.  The orchards were pink and white on the hills.  Slowly the day wore away.  The river narrowed, the hills reared high, and in the sloping meadows gray ribs and shoulders of granite appeared.  The air had a tang of the mountains.  Everywhere were signs of spring, of new vigor and fresh life.  But the voices at each station sounded drowsier than at the last, the eyes appeared more stolid, and to Roger it felt like a journey far back into old ways of living, old beliefs and old ideals.  He had always had this feeling, and always he had relished it, this dive into his boyhood.  But it was different to-day, for this was more than a journey, it was a migration, too.  Close about him in the car were Edith and her children, bound for a new home up there in the very heart and stronghold of all old things in America.

Old things dear to Edith’s heart.  As she sat by the window staring out, he watched her shapely little head; he noted the hardening lines on her forehead and the gray which had come in her hair.  It had been no easy move for her, this, she’d shown pluck to take it so quietly.  He saw her smile a little, then frown and go on with her thinking.  What was she thinking about, he wondered—­all she had left behind in New York, or the rest of her life which lay ahead?  She had always longed for things simple and old.  Well, she would have them now with a vengeance, summer and winter, the year ’round, in the battered frame house on the mountain side, the birthplace of her family.  A recollection came to him of a summer’s dusk two years ago and a woman with a lawn mower cutting the grass on the family graves.  Would Edith ever be like that, a mere custodian of the past?  If she did, he thought, she would be false to the very traditions