f a mind to go and hear the boy himself, that anybody who could peel
a bill off of Mert Hagley's roll was surely a curiosity.

Cynthia's son had walked with Roger Allan through the twilight of his
first real day in Green Valley to Grandma Wentworth's cottage and the
three had sat talking until the small hours. Then Grandma had taken
Cynthia's tall son up-stairs into the large airy guest room. She came
down a little later to find Roger gazing at a framed photograph of a
long gone day.

She came and looked too at the group of young faces. At herself, then
a girl of eighteen; at the boy beside her who later became her husband;
and at Cynthia, lovely Cynthia Churchill, laughing out at life in her
sweet yet serious way.

"Well, Roger," Grandma spoke softly with a hint of tears in her voice,
"we have waited years, you and I, for a message from her, a heart
message. And now it has come--it has come. She has sent us her boy."

"Yes," breathed Roger Allan, "she has sent us the message--she has sent
me her son."

They knew, these two, why he had come. It may be that even the tall
young man whose father and mother were sleeping the long sleep in
far-off India may have guessed why in the end the frail but still
lovely mother had begged him to go back to Green Valley, to its sweet
old homes and warm-hearted folk. To bring comfort and find it--that
had been the little mother's plan.

He believed he would find it. The loneliness that had tired him so
ever since his mother slipped away was no longer a sharp, never silent
pain, a great emptiness, but rather a sweet sorrow that was almost a
friend.

He slept in the big airy room with its patchwork quilt of blue and
white, its rugs and curtains to match, and looked at pictures of his
mother. From the windows he watched the sun rise and shine on the
merry little hills and the yellow road that wound up to his mother's
old home. As he breathed in the wine of the spring mornings he
comprehended the great hunger, the wild longing, that at times must
have overwhelmed the little mother in those last days in India. And he
thought he understood those last words of hers.

"Son, you must stay with your father as long as he needs you. But when
that duty is over you must go back to the little green town on the
other side of the world. Your father and I brought a message to India.
You must take one back to my people. Oh, you will love it--you will
love it--the little dear town f