ent finality, and, so, to
prevent them from forming an alliance and a junction of forces with the
traitor softness within him. Besides, gentle, roundabout, gradual
measures would require time--delay; and he must "put his house in order"
forthwith.

Thus, even the consolation that he was at least doing right was denied
him. As he lay there he could see himself harshly forcing the bitter
medicine upon his son, the cure for a disease for which he was himself
responsible; he could see his son's look and could not deny its justice.
"I reckon he hates me," thought Hiram, pouring vitriol into his own
wounds, "and I reckon he's got good cause to."

But there was in the old miller a Covenanter fiber tough as ironwood.
The idea of yielding did not enter his head. He accepted his sufferings
as part of his punishment for past indulgence and weakness; he would
endure, and go forward. His wife understood him by a kind of intuition
which, like most of our insight into the true natures of those close
about us, was a gradual permeation from the one to the other rather than
clear, deliberate reasoning. But the next morning her sore and anxious
mother's heart misread the gloom of his strong face into sternness
toward her only son.

"When did you allow to put the boy to work, father?" she finally said,
and her tone unintentionally made Hiram feel more than ever as if he had
sentenced "the boy" to hard labor in the degradation and disgrace of a
chain gang.

As he waited some time for self-control before answering, she thought her
inquiry had deepened his resentment. "Not that I don't think you're
right, maybe," she hastened to add, "though"--this wistfully, in a
feminine and maternal subtlety of laying the first lines for sapping and
mining his position--"I often think about our life, all work and no play,
and wonder if we oughtn't to give the children the chance we never had."

"No good never came of idleness," said Hiram, uncompromisingly, "and to
be busy about foolishness is still worse. Work or rot--that's life."

"That's so; that's so," she conceded. And she was sincere; for that was
her real belief, and what she had hinted was a mere unthinking repetition
of the shallow, comfortable philosophy of most people--those "go easys"
and "do nothings" and "get nowheres" wherewith Saint X and the
surrounding country were burdened. "Still," she went on, aloud, "Arthur
hasn't got any bad habits, like most of the young men round here with