“Oh, I nevah thought about things that way befo’!” sobbed John Jay.  “I’ll nevah sneak out of the work again.  I’ll tote the wood and watah ‘thout waitin’ to be asked, an’ I’ll nevah lick out my tongue at her behine her back as long as I live!”

George bit his lips to keep from laughing, although he was touched by the little penitent’s distress.

“Do you know why I said such hard things to you?” he asked.  “It was to open your eyes.  I want to make a man of you, John Jay.  Let me tell you some things about your grandmother that you have never heard.  Her whole life has been a struggle, and such a very sad one.”

John Jay rubbed his shirt sleeve across his eyes and gave a final snuffle.  Some people never have the awakening that came to him that afternoon.  Some people go along all their days with no other thought in life than to burrow through their own mole-hills.  There in the hay, with the shining dust of the sunbeams falling athwart the old barn floor, the boy lay and listened.  Thoughts that he had no words for, ambitions that he could not express, yet that filled him with vague longing, seemed to vibrate along the earnest voice, and tremble from the fulness of George’s heart into his.  Even after George stopped talking and began to whistle softly in the pause that followed, John Jay lay quite still with his face hidden in his arms.

Ned came in presently, rustling around through the hay after eggs, and singing at the top of his voice.  The sound seemed to bring John Jay back to his common every-day self.  He sat up, grinning as if he had never heard of such things as tears; but those he had shed must have made his eyesight clearer.  As he slid down from the hay and walked along beside George, he noticed for the first time how slow and faltering the steps beside his had grown.  As they climbed up the hill to the church, it seemed to him that the beloved face looked unusually thin and haggard in the strong light of the sunset.

George did not play long this evening.  He knew that the quiet little listener on the steps bent as readily to the changing moods of his melody as the clover does to the fitful breezes; so he changed abruptly from the minor chords that his fingers instinctively reached for, to an old hymn that smoothed away the pathetic pucker of the boy’s forehead.  Then he pulled out the stops and began a loud burst of martial music, so glad and triumphant, that, listening, one felt all great things possible of achievement.  John Jay stood up, swinging his cap on the end of a stick which he carried, with all the curves and rythmic motions of a drum major.

After George came out and locked the door, he stood for a moment looking out fondly across the peaceful fields, still fair with the fading glow of the summer sun.  John Jay looked too, feeling at the same time the touch of a caressing hand laid lightly on his bare head, but he could not see the lips above him that moved in a silent benediction.