Here was nothing new and disturbing.  Edith’s children?  Yes, they were new, but they were not disturbing.  Their growth each summer was a joy, a renewal of life in the battered old house.  Here was no huge tenement family crowding in with dirty faces, clamorous demands for aid, but only five delightful youngsters, clean and fresh, of his own blood.  He loved the small excitements, the plans and plots and discoveries, the many adventures that filled their days.  He spent hours with their mother, listening while she talked of them.  Edith did so love this place and she ran the house so beautifully.  It was so cool and fragrant, so clean and so old-fashioned.

Deborah, too, came under the spell.  She grew as lazy as a cat and day by day renewed her strength from the hills and from Edith’s little brood.  Roger had feared trouble there, for he knew how Edith disapproved of her sister’s new ideas.  But although much with the children, Deborah apparently had no new ideas at all.  She seemed to be only listening.  One balmy day at sunset, Roger saw her lying on the grass with George sprawled by her side.  Her head upon one arm, she appeared to be watching the cattle in the sloping pasture above.  Slowly, as though each one of them was drawn by mysterious unseen chains, they were drifting down toward the barn where it was almost milking time.  George was talking earnestly.  She threw a glance at him from time to time, and Roger could see how intent were her eyes.  Yes, Deborah knew how to study a boy.

Only once during the summer did she talk about her work.  On a walk with her father one day she took him into a small forlorn building, a mere cabin of one room.  The white paint had long been worn away, the windows were all broken, half the old shingles had dropped from the roof and on the flagpole was no flag.  It was the district schoolhouse where for nearly half his life Deborah’s grandfather had taught a score of pupils.  Inside were a blackboard, a rusty stove, a teacher’s desk and a dozen forms, grown mouldy and worm-eaten now.  A torn and faded picture of Lincoln was upon one wall, half hidden by a spider’s web and by a few old dangling rags which once had been red, white and blue.  Below, still clinging to the wall, was an old scrap of paper, on which in a large rugged hand there had been written long ago a speech, but it had been worn away until but three words were legible—­“conceived and dedicated—­”

“Tell me about your school,” she said.  “All you can remember.”  Seated at her grandfather’s desk she asked Roger many questions.  And his recollections, at first dim and hazy, began to clear a little.

“By George!” he exclaimed.  “Here are my initials!”

He stooped over one of the benches.

“Oh, dearie!  Where?” He pointed them out, and then while he sat on the rude old bench for some time more she questioned him.

“But your school was not all here,” she said musingly at last, “it was up on the farm, besides, where you learned to plough and sow and reap and take care of the animals in the barn, and mend things that were broken, and—­oh, turn your hand to anything.  But millions of children nowadays are growing up in cities, you see.”