"she observed. "I fear he will put notions into the child's head.
Not care about blood, indeed! What are we coming to, I wonder?
Well, well, I suppose it is what I deserve for allowing myself to
fall so madly in love with your father. When I look back now it
seems to me that I could have achieved quite as much with a great
deal less expenditure of emotion."

"Now, now, Lucy, " said Tucker, closing the gilt clasps of the
Bible, "you're not yet seventy, and by the time you reach eighty
you will see things clearer. I'm a good deal younger than you,
but I'm two-thirds in the grave already, which makes a
difference. My life's been long and pleasant as it is, but when I
glance back upon it now I tell you the things I regret least in
it are my youthful follies. A man must be very far in his dotage,
indeed, when he begins to wear a long face over the sharp breaths
that he drew in youth. I came very near ruining myself for a
woman once, and the fact that I was ready to do it--even though I
didn't--is what in the past I like best to recall to-day. It
makes it all easier and better, somehow, and it seems to put a
zest into the hours I spend now on my old bench. To have had one
emotion that was bigger than you or your universe is to have had
life, my dear."

The old lady wiped her eyes. "It may be so, brother, it may be
so," she admitted; "but not before Lila. Is that you,
Christopher?"

The young man came in and crossed slowly to the fire, bending for
an instant over her chair. He was conscious suddenly that his
clothes smelled of the fields and that the cold water of the well