"Sarah," said the Colonel, "you are a soft-hearted--mother!"
Captain Bob spoke from beyond the table. Captain Bob did not often speak, nor often with especial weight, but he had been pondering this matter for three quarters of an hour, and he had a certain kind of common sense. "I think Sarah's right. Medway's a curiosity to me, but I've always held that he was born that way. You are, you know; you're born so or you aren't born so. He's pretty consistent. There never was a time when I wouldn't have said that he would come to the fore just as soon as he didn't have to deny himself. Now the time's come, and here he is. I think Sarah's right. Forgive and forget! If he wants to pay his debts--and God knows he owes you and Sarah a lot--I'd let him. And as to Gipsy there--better late than never! Read her what he says."
"I am going to," said the Colonel sardonically. He read the page that remained, then laid the letter on the table, put his hands behind his head and regarded his granddaughter. "The benevolent parent arrived at last upon the scene--a kindly disposed stepmother with millions--and that teacher of surface culture to young ladies at Eglantine! Among the three you ought to be quite ideally provided for! I hope Medway will like the teacher."
Old Miss came, unexpectedly, to her granddaughter's aid. "Don't worry her, Colonel! I haven't thought her looking well to-day. Give her her letter, and let her go and think it out quietly by herself.--If you like, child, Phoebe shall bring you your supper."
Hagar did like--oh, would like that, thank you, grandmother, very much! She took the letter--it was addressed to her in a woman's hand--which her father had enclosed and which her grandfather now held out to her, and went away, feeling somewhat blindly for the door, leaving the others staring after her. Upstairs she lit her lamp and placed it on Maria's table, by Maria's couch. Then, curled there, against the chintz-covered pillows,--they were in a pattern of tulips and roses,--she read the very kind letter which her stepmother had written.
The New Springs had been so christened about a hundred years before, when a restless pioneer family had moved westward and upward from the Old Springs, thirty miles away, at the foot of the great forest-clad range. The New Springs had been a deer-lick, and apparently, from the number of arrowheads forever being unearthed, a known region to the Indians. Now the Indians were gone, and the deer fast, fast withdrawing. Occasionally buck or doe was shot, but for the most part they were phantoms of the past. So with the bear who used to come down to the corncribs in the lonely clearings. Bear Mountain still rose dark blue, like a wall, and the stark cliff called Bear's Den caught the first ray of the sun, but the bears themselves were seldom seen. They also were phantoms of the past. But the fish stayed in the mountain streams. There were many streams and many fish,--bright, speckled mountain trout, darting and flashing among pools and cascades, now seen in the sunlight, now lurking by fern-crowned rocks, in the shadow of the dark hemlock spruce. The region was Fisherman's Paradise.