let her rest. Through all her life that voice of the
Choir Unseen would strike the strings of her heart. She knew it.

But she would not. Never would she give in to it.

In the morning, even before the coming of the dawn, the music came
again; and it beat upon her worn, ragged nerves, and tore and wrenched
at her heart until she could stand it no longer.

The sisters were taking up again the burden and the way of the day.

She could not stand it! She could not stay here! She must go back to
her hills, where there was peace for her.

She heard the sister going down to unlock the street door so that
Father Tenney could walk in when it was time and go up to the chapel
for the sisters' early mass.

That was her chance! The sisters would be in chapel. The girls would
be still in their rooms.

She dressed hastily and threw her books into a bag. She would take
only these and her money. She had enough to get home on. The rest did
not matter.

When she heard the priest's step pass in the hall, she slipped out and
down the dim, broad stairs.

The great, heavy door of the convent stood like the gate of the world.
It swung slowly, deliberately, on its well-oiled, silent hinges.

She stood in the portal a moment, drinking hungrily the fresh, free
air of the morning that had come down from her hills. Then she fled
away into the dawn.

The sun was just showing over Lansing mountain as Jeffrey Whiting came
out of his mother's house dragging a hair trunk by the handle. His
uncle, Cassius Bascom, drove up from the barn with the team and sled.
Jeffrey threw his trunk upon the sled and bent to lash it down safe.
It was twenty-five miles of half broken road and snowdrifts to
Lowville and the railroad.

Jeffrey Whiting was doing what the typical American farm boy has been
doing for the last hundred years and what he will probably continue to
do as long as we Americans are what we are. He is not always a
dreamer, your farm boy, when he starts down from his hills or his
cross-roads farm to see the big world and conquer it. More often than
you would think, he knows that he is not going to conquer it at all.
And he is not, on the other hand, merely running away from the
drudgery of the farm. He knows that he will probably have to work
harder than he would ever have worked on the farm. But he knows that
he has things to sell. And he is going down into the markets of men.
He has a good head and a strong body. He has a power of work