“Queer how things dovetail.  We drop a stitch and then go back and pick it up—­now there is that place of yours, down South, Ridge House!”

Doris’s face twitched and then, because she was in that state closely bordering upon the unknown, that state open to impressions and suggestions from sources outside the explainable, Silver Gap seemed to open alluringly to her imagination.  It was like a dropped stitch to be taken up and woven into the pattern!

She suddenly felt that she had always known she must go back.  It was like the heart trouble—­a thing on her road!  Doris smiled and David patted her hands.

“That’s the way it strikes me,” he said, quite as if he were gaining his inspiration whence hers came.  “After you told me about the—­the children, you know, Doris, years ago, I went down there and gave the place a look-over.  The South always affects me like a—­well, a lotus flower—­sleeping but filled with wonderful dreams.  It gets me!  Why, after seeing Ridge House I even went so far as to buy a piece of land known as Blowing Rock Clearing.  I’ve planned, if that scamp of a nephew of mine ever develops into a sawbones, to leave him in charge here and go down South myself and put up a shack on my clearing.”  Martin was watching Doris now from under his brows; he was talking against the silence that might engulf her again; seeking to hold her to a future that he had been vaguely considering in the past.  He thankfully saw her interest growing.

“You did that, David—­how like you!”

The tears still came easily to Doris’s eyes.

“Oh, well, I have a thrifty streak, and I hated to see a property like Ridge House lie fallow.  It’s great.  The buying of Blowing Rock was pure Yankee sense of a bargain.  But you see how it all works out.  You’ll have the time of your life developing your holdings and, at odd moments, I can start my shack.  Look upon the change as an adventure—­nothing permanent.  In a year or so you may be able to spend most of the time on pavements—­though why in God’s name you want to is hard to imagine.”

Doris was smiling.

“But the girls!” she faltered.

“Forget them.  Give them a chance to think of you.  Take them abroad—­that will be good for you all, but in the autumn, Doris, go South!  You must escape next winter.”

CHAPTER VIII

“One is assured that there is a Power that fights with us against the confusion and evil of the world.”

The warm June sunlight lay over the broad lawns and meadows of Dondale; it touched with luring power the buds to blossom and, by its tricks of magic, girlhood to womanhood.

Only a month ago Joan and Nancy Thornton and those who, with them, were about to leave Miss Phillips’s school, had seemed little girls, but now they were changed.  There was a gravity when they looked back at the safe, happy years that not even the glory of the future could dispel.