"As if Lew would ever need that!" cried Natalie.
Soon after leaving the house, Leighton struck off to the right and up. His step was not springy. His head hung low on his breast, and his fingers gripped nervously at the light stick he carried. He did not speak, and Lewis knew enough not to break that silence. They crossed a field, Leighton walking slightly ahead. He did not have to look up to lead the way.
Presently they came into a lane. It dipped off to the left, into the valley. It was bordered by low, gray stone walls. On its right hung a thick wood of second-growth trees--a New England wood, various beyond the variety of any other forest on earth. It breathed a mingled essence of faint odors. The fronds of the trees reached over and embowered the lane.
On the left the view was open to the valley by reason of a pasture. The low stone wall was topped by a snaky fence of split rails. They were so old, so gray, that they, too, seemed of stone. Beyond them sloped the meager pasture-land; brown, almost barren even in the youth of the year. It was strewn with flat, outcropping rocks. Here and there rose a mighty oak. A splotch of green marked a spring. Below the spring one saw the pale blush of laurel in early June.
Leighton stopped and prodded the road with his stick. Lewis looked down. He saw that his father's hand was trembling. His eyes wandered to a big stone that peeped from the loam in the very track of any passing wheel. The stone was covered with moss--old moss. It was a long time since wheels had passed that way.
Leighton walked on a few steps, and then paused again, his eyes fixed on a spot at the right of the lane where the old wall had tumbled and brought with it a tangled mass of fox-grape vine. He left the roadway and sat on the lower wall, his back against a rail. He motioned to Lewis to sit down too.
"I have brought you here," said Leighton and stopped. His voice had been so low that Lewis had understood not a word. "I have brought you here," said Leighton again, and this time clearly, "to tell you about your mother."
Lewis restrained himself from looking at his father's face.
"Your mother's name," went on Leighton, "was Jeanette O'Reilly. She was a milk-maid. That is, she didn't have to milk the cows, but she took charge of the milk when it came into the creamery and did to and with it all the things that women do with milk. I only knew your mother when she was seventeen. No one seemed to know where Jeanette came from. Perhaps Aunt Jed knew. I think she did, but she never told. I never asked. To me Jeanette came straight from the hand of God.