Mr. Weston laughed. "Yes, but it ain't so darned easy to get there first." Vance was silent, and the family exchanged perturbed glances. But just then Mrs. Scrimser came lumbering in, cured of her rheumatism (by the "Spirit of Service" prayers—which unhappily had not succeeded with her husband), but moving heavily, as usual, with a stick to support her big rambling frame. She sat down among them in the sleeping porch, where Vance now took his daily rest cure, listened to their perplexity, and said with her dreamy prophetic smile: "There's only once in a life when anybody wants one particular thing so bad that nothing else on earth'll do instead. I wouldn't wonder if wanting a thing that way wasn't about the nearest we ever get to happiness." She turned her softly humorous eyes on her grandson. "I guess Vanny'll have to go East."

It was then that Mrs. Weston remembered her cousin Lucilla Tracy's postcard. "That place of Lorburn Tracy's isn't so far from New York," she remarked, "up there on the Hudson. And Vance'd have good country air, anyhow, and good milk. May be Lucilla'd be glad to take him in as a boarder for a few weeks. I don't believe they're any too well off, from what she said last time she wrote to me. Since Lorburn's death I guess she and the children have had pretty hard times making the two ends meet. Anyhow, I ought to answer that card… ."

Vance said nothing: the suggestion came to him as a surprise. He knew that Paul's Landing, where his mother's cousin lived, was not above an hour and a half by rail from New York, and his heart was beginning to beat excitedly, though he maintained an air of indifference.

But Lorin Weston was not indifferent. He seized on the suggestion as an unforseen way of indulging his son without too great an expenditure of money—an important consideration in view of the heavy cost of Vance's illness, and the complications and embarrassments likely to result from Weston's move in raising again the vexed question of the Crampton water supply.