ly answer was a sigh, and he continued: "We've still got enough
laid by in the bank to live somewhere for a few years an' give the
children decent educations. If we stay here too long maybe we can't even
do that. What shall we do?"

For a while they sat without talk, and then the mother brokenly
suggested: "Let's hear what Ham says an' let's make up our minds slow."

Together they rose, and, blowing out the lamp, went up the stairs. As
they passed Ham's door they paused, and the father whispered, "I don't
want the boy to think I'm hard on him."

Inside, there was no light, but they could hear the eldest son thrashing
restlessly about in his bed, and they knew that he was not sleeping.

Outside the snow was still falling with quiet relentlessness. It was
wrapping deeper and deeper the white slopes of the mountains and piling
feathery drifts against the windward sides of the sighing pines. Here
and there a burdened branch creaked under its travail. Now and then the
wind that drove the snow rose to a gusty whisper, and a stark limb
scraped the eaves of the house with grating, lifeless fingers. But
between the occasional stress-cries of the storm, there came the low,
dirge-like monotony of the sifting snowfall. And as always in old houses
there were the little voices and the minute nameless stirrings of the
night. The ghost-moan of drafty chimneys and the creak of warped timbers
became audible accentuators of the silence.

Ham heard them all and to him they were like the wretched echoes of a
jail where the small clicking night-sounds creep into dreams and poison
them with reminders of confinement. His brain was hot with a fever of
restiveness and beyond his cell-like room he saw the world from which he
was barred: the world which the tongueless voice in his heart kept
heralding to him as his own world to conquer.

In another bed across the carpetless floor rose and fell the even breath
of Edwardes, who was sleeping as a man sleeps after fighting a blizzard.
Under the boy's own hot cheek was the roughness of a slipless pillow and
his limbs thrashed between coarse sheets that covered a lumpy mattress.

Out beyond the barriers of the snow-stifled mountains stretched endless
continents and seas inviting his soul. Men of alien races and alien
thought trod lands where palm trees nodded along white beaches and where
the sea was blue as sapphire. Thousands of miles away were deserts
agleam with gold and caravans swinging betw