John Westley recalled Jerry's face when she told her wish: "I want to go along that shining road--down there--around and around--to the other side of the mountain." He nodded now as though he understood exactly what Mrs. Travis meant by "her problem." He understood, too, though he had no child of his own, just why her voice trembled ever so slightly.
"We can't keep little Jerry from growing into big Jerry nor from wanting to stretch her wings a bit and yet--oh, the world's such a big, hard place--there's so much cruelty and selfishness in it, so much unhappiness! If I could only keep her here always, contented----" she stopped abruptly, a little ashamed of her outburst.
John Westley knew, just as though she had told him in detail all about herself, that life, sometime and somewhere away from the quiet of Sunnyside, had hurt this little woman.
"Dr. Travis and I find company in our books," Mrs. Travis went on, "and our neighbors, though we're quite far apart, are pleasant, simple-hearted people. Jerry does all the things that young people like to do; she swims down in Miller's Lake, and skates and skis and she roams the year round all over the side of Kettle; she can call the birds and wild squirrels to her as though she was a little wild creature herself. She takes care of her own little garden. And I do everything with her. Yet she is always talking as though some day she'd run away! Of course I know she wouldn't do exactly _that_, but I sometimes wonder if I have the right to try to hold her back. I haven't forgotten my own dreams." She laughed. "I certainly never dreamed of _this_"--sweeping her hand toward the shadowy room--"and yet this is better, I've found, than the rosy picture my young fancy used to paint!"
John Westley wished that he had read more and worked less hard at making cement-mixers; so much had been printed in books about this reaching out of youth that he might repeat now, if he knew it all, to the little mother. Instead he found himself telling her of his own three nieces. Then quite casually Mrs. Travis remarked:
"Some very pleasant people have opened Cobble House over on Cobble Mountain--Mr. and Mrs. Will Allan. I met her at church. She's--well, I knew in an instant that I was going to like her and that she'd help me about Jerry. I----"