er ways," she went on. "Somehow it's brought him
back wonderfully the last two or three days, and especially at night
when I'd hear you creaking down the stair. There's a board there which
always does creak, and I'd hear you trying to remember which it was, the
same as _he_ used to----"

"I haven't meant to keep you awake, mother."

"I've been awake. When you're getting along like, you don't sleep much,
Peter. Sleep is for dreaming, some of it, and the old don't dream."

"You're not to go calling yourself old, mother!"

"And me with a son going twenty-three! We weren't so young either when
we were married, your father and I ... but I want you should sleep,
Peter, and dream when you can. You have pleasant dreams, son?"

"Any amount of them." He was going off into one of those bright
fantasies of what he should do when he was rich as he meant to be, with
which he had so often beguiled Ellen's pain, but she kissed him and sent
him to bed again lest Ellen should hear them.

It was not more than a day or two after that the minister's wife caught
young Mr. Weatheral walking with his mother in the back pasture with his
arm about her, and was slightly shocked by it, for though it was thought
highly commendable in him to have paid off the mortgage and managed a
silk dress for her and Ellen besides, Bloombury was not habituated to a
lively expression of family affection. Peter had consented to gather the
huckleberries which Ellen insisted were of a superior flavour in the
back pasture, on the sole condition that his mother should come with
him, and the minister's wife had just stepped aside on her way to the
Tillinghurst's to gather the southerwood which grew there, for the
minister's winter cough, when she caught sight of them.

"She couldn't have stared more if she'd caught me with a girl." Peter
protested.

"It's only that she'd have thought it more likely," his mother
extenuated. "I hope you aren't going to be a girl-hater, Peter. I want
you should marry some time, and if I haven't seemed anxious about it
before now, you mustn't think it's because I want to keep you for Ellen
and me. What I don't want is that you should take to it just _because_
there's a girl. Not but what that's natural, but there's more to it than
that, Peter. For you," she supplemented. She sat down on a gray, round
stone while Peter stripped the bushes at her feet, and watched to see if
his colour rose while she talked, or his gaze failed to meet