rest in listening to
idle talk; then he looked back over his shoulder at his boy. "On your
account!" said he. "How should it be on your account? I have always
meant to go south sooner or later."

Therewith he left the room.

Katharine stared after him with her hands folded above her wooden bowl.
She had always been rather afraid of him, and had formerly almost hated
him on account of his obstinacy. When he began to be kinder to the boy,
she did not know what to make of it, but she felt more contented in the
house than before. What he had said today, made her heart beat hard.
There was something about him that seemed as if he were forcibly
controlling his own stubborn nature for the sake of another, and as
there had been in his obstinacy something terrifying, so now, in the
force with which he for the first time constrained it, there was
something almost great. Katharine felt her breath come quicker. A
reverent timidity came over her. Stephen Fausch had caused it.

Meanwhile Cain had sat down again on his block and was staring into the
fire, with his hands clasped around his knee. "He is going for my sake
though," said he musingly to himself.

"Yes," answered Katharine.

Then they kept silence for some time. Each was thinking busily. But in
Cain's mind the thoughts were fairly seething. He began to imagine what
it would be like to leave the place where everybody knew him and
pointed at him scornfully. A feeling of relief arose mightily within
him. He leaned back until his arms straightened out. His youthful
health and strength seemed at this moment to effervesce, so that he
felt a new buoyancy. This feeling overcame the discomfort he had felt
at the idea of his father's making a sacrifice for him. His joy in life
and work redoubled. His gratitude to his father increased and grew into
a resolve: "You must work for him. Good Lord, how hard you must work."

But once a scruple came over him. "I could have gone away by myself" he
said, speaking his thought aloud. Whereupon Katharine answered, after
thinking a little: "It seems to me that he wouldn't let you go alone
now."

After a little while longer she added: "He wants to have you with him."

And so in very few words they exchanged their ideas, until Fausch
called out from the living room that he wanted his supper.

This evening Cain sang as he went to bed. Fausch listened long to his
beautiful voice, not loud, but almost like a distant bell, and the
sound rang s