“Oh, I know all about that, father dear.  It’s just a stage he’s going through.  And it’s the same way with Elizabeth, too, and her crazy idea of becoming a doctor.  She took that from Allan Baird, and George took his from Deborah!  They’ll get over it soon enough—­”

“They won’t get over it!” Roger cried.  “Their dreams are parts of something new!  Something I’m quite vague about—­but some of it has come to stay!  You’re losing all your chances—­just as I did years ago!  You’ll never know your children!”

But he uttered this cry to himself alone.  Outwardly he only frowned.  And Edith had gone on to say,

“I do hope that Deborah won’t come up this summer.  She’s been very good and kind, of course, and if she comes she’ll be doing it entirely on my account.  But I don’t want her here—­I want her to marry, the sooner the better, and come to her senses—­be happy, I mean.  And I wish you would tell her so.”

Within a few days after this Deborah wrote to her father that she was coming the next week.  He said nothing to Edith about it at first, he had William saddled and went for a ride to try to determine what he should do.  But it was a ticklish business.  For women were queer and touchy, and once more he felt the working of those uncanny family ties.

“Deborah,” he reflected, “is coming up here because she feels it’s selfish of her to stay away.  If she marries at once, as she told me herself, she thinks Edith will be hurt.  Edith won’t be hurt—­and if Deborah comes, there’ll be trouble every minute she stays.  But can I tell her so?  Not at all.  I can’t say, ‘You’re not wanted here.’  If I do, she’ll be hurt.  Oh Lord, these girls!  And Deborah knows very well that if she does get married this month, with Laura abroad and Edith up here and only me at the wedding, Edith will smile to herself and say, ‘Now isn’t that just like Deborah?’”

As Roger slowly rode along a steep and winding mountain road, gloomily he reflected to what petty little troubles a family of women could descend, so soon after death itself.  And he lifted his eyes up to the hills and decided to leave this matter alone.  If women would be women, let them settle their own affairs.  Deborah was due to arrive on the following Friday evening.  All right, let her come, he thought.  She would soon see she was in the way, and then in a little affectionate talk he would suggest that she marry right off and have a decent honeymoon before the school year opened.

So he dismissed it from his mind.  And as he listened in the dusk to the numberless murmuring voices of living creatures large and small which rose out of the valley, and as from high above him the serenity of the mountains there towering over thousands of years stole into his spirit, Roger had a large quieting sense of something high and powerful looking down upon the earth, a sense of all humanity honeycombed with millions upon millions of small sorrows, absorbing joys and hopes and fears, and in spite of them all the Great Life sweeping on, with no Great Death to check its course, no immense catastrophe, all these little troubles like mere tiny specks of foam upon the surface of the tide.