"Is this the first time you have been up here in the mountains, Richard? " her father asked me, turning in his chair towards me.
"I've never been within a hundred miles of here before, sir. It's a different country up here, but I suppose you would think the same about the coast, wouldn't you？"
"Oh, but Father used to live in Norfolk," Gretchen said."Didn't you, Father？"
"I lived there for nearly three years."
There was something else he would say, and both of us waited for him to continue.
"Father is a master mechanic," Gretchen whispered to me."He works in the railroad shops."
"Yes," he said after a while. "I've lived in many places, but here is where I wish to stay."
My first thought was to ask him why he preferred the mountains to other sections, but suddenly I was aware that both he and Gretchen were strangely silent. Between them, I sat wondering about it.
After a while he spoke again, not to me and not to Gretchen, but as though he were speaking to someone else on the porch, a fourth person whom I had failed to see in the darkness. I waited, tense and excited, for him to continue.
Gretchen moved her chair a few inches closer to mine, her motions gentle and without sound. The warmth of the river came up and covered us like a blanket on a chill night.
"After Gretchen and the other two girls lost their mother,"he said, almost inaudibly, bending forward over his knees and gazing out across the broad green river, "after we lost their mother, I came back to the mountains to live. I couldn't stay in Norfolk, and I couldn't stand it in Baltimore. This was the only place on earth where I could find peace. Gretchen remembers her mother, but neither of you can yet understand how it is with me. Her mother and I were born here in the mountains, and we lived here together for almost twenty years. Then after she left us, I moved away, foolishly believing that I could forget. But I was wrong. Of course I was wrong. A man can't forget the mother of his children, even though he knows he will never see her again."