Adelaide, almost in tears over her brother’s catastrophe, was thrilled with admiration of his silent, courageous bearing.  “What are you going to do, Artie?”

This incautious question drew his inward ferment boiling to the surface.  “He has me down and I’ve got to take his medicine,” said the young man, teeth together and eyes dark with fury.

This she did not admire.  Her first indignation abated, as she sat on there thinking it out.  “Maybe father is nearer right than we know,” she said to herself finally.  “After all, Arthur will merely be doing as father does.  There’s something wrong with him, and with me, too, or we shouldn’t think that so terrible.”  But to Arthur she said nothing.  Encourage him in his present mood she must not; and to try to dissuade him would simply goad him on.

CHAPTER IV

THE SHATTERED COLOSSUS

That night there was sleep under Hiram Ranger’s roof for Mary the cook only.  Of the four wakeful ones the most unhappy was Hiram himself, the precipitator of it all.  Arthur had the consolation of his conviction that his calamity was unjust; Adelaide and her mother, of their conviction that in the end it could not but be well with Arthur.  For Hiram there was no consolation.  He reviewed and re-reviewed the facts, and each time he reached again his original conclusion; the one course in repairing the mistakes of the boy’s bringing up was a sharp rightabout.  “Don’t waste no time gettin’ off the wrong road, once you’re sure it’s wrong,” had been a maxim of his father, and he had found it a rule with no exceptions.  He appreciated that there is a better way from the wrong road into the right than a mad dash straight across the stumpy fields and rocky gullies between.  That rough, rude way, however, was the single way open to him here.  Whenever it had become necessary for him to be firm with those he loved, it had rarely been possible for him to do right in the right way; he had usually been forced to do right in the wrong way—­to hide himself from them behind a manner of cold and silent 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.