r's
perplexed an' can't reach a conclusion, he goes to sleep an' wakes up
with a clearer judgment. Once a mistake is made, it can't be unmade; but
I don't want you to think that I ain't ponderin' this question."

Ahead of him Ham saw Paul and Mary slip up the stairway and his aunt
rise, with the stiff disapproval of silence, and leave the room. He
himself remained only a few minutes longer and then with a low-voiced
good-night he pressed his father's hand, and felt the grip of stern
affection on his own. He took up and lighted the small lamp that was to
light him to bed, and as he climbed the boxed-in stairway, the shadows
wavered on the walls at each side, and he heard the wail of the wind
around the eaves.

When he set the lamp down and began undressing he realized for the first
time the gnawing weariness of muscles that the day had taxed with chores
and tramping. Tomorrow morning he must rise while the windows still let
in only the chilling gray of dawn. Yet he stopped with half his clothes
removed, and, going to an improvised shelf in the corner, took down a
battered volume. It was not until the lamp warned him of the spent hours
with its dying sputter that he laid aside the resonant sentences in
which Carlyle had been talking to him of heroes and their worship. In
another room across the hall he had heard stirrings for an hour after
the silence of sleep had fallen on the rest of the house.

There Mary, unable to compose herself at once, had been snipping at the
pattern of a gown with which, in her fancy, she was to charm those men
who did not wear lumbermen's socks and neglect their razors. But now
even Mary was asleep. It was cold in the room, and outside the world was
bitter, but Ham was far from sleep. In his mind still worked and seethed
the unresting ferment which had become a torment. The annals of the
great had fired him to passion. The littleness of his room and of his
life stifled him. He wanted to breathe freer, and, drawing on his
mackinaw, he tiptoed noiselessly down the stairs and let himself out
into the night.

There he found a frozen world, shut in by low-drifting clouds and
swallowed in a smother of darkness. Even the snow was gray, but at least
there he could look out across space.

As though his eyes followed a compass needle, he slowly swung them until
his gaze set toward his desire, and because vaguely he thought of New
York as the center of the great outer world, his face was to the south