When Adelaide, sent by her mother, came to sit with him, he said:  “Draw the blinds, child, and leave me alone.  I want to rest.”  She obeyed him.  At intervals of half an hour she opened the door softly, looked in at him, thought he was asleep, and went softly away.  But he had never been further from sleep in his life.  Henrietta Hastings’s harum-scarum gossiping and philosophizing happened to be just what his troubled mind needed to precipitate its clouds into a solid mass that could be clearly seen and carefully examined.  Heretofore he had accepted the conventional explanations of all the ultimate problems, had regarded philosophers as time wasters, own brothers to the debaters who whittled on dry-goods boxes at the sidewalk’s edge in summer and about the stoves in the rear of stores in winter, settling all affairs save their own.  But now, sitting in enforced inaction and in the chill and calm which diffuses from the tomb, he was using the unused, the reflective, half of his mind.

Even as Henrietta was talking, he began to see what seemed to him the hidden meaning in the mysterious “Put your house in order” that would give him no rest.  But he was not the man to make an important decision in haste, was the last man in the world to inflict discomfort, much less pain, upon anyone, unless the command to do it came unmistakably in the one voice he dared not disobey.  Day after day he brooded; night after night he fought to escape.  But, slowly, inexorably, his iron inheritance from Covenanter on one side and Puritan on the other asserted itself.  Heartsick, and all but crying out in anguish, he advanced toward the stern task which he could no longer deny or doubt that the Most High God had set for him.

He sent for Dory Hargrave’s father.

Mark Hargrave was president of the Tecumseh Agricultural and Classical University, to give it its full legal entitlements.  It consisted in a faculty of six, including Dr. Hargrave, and in two meager and modest, almost mean “halls,” and two hundred acres of land.  There were at that time just under four hundred students, all but about fifty working their way through.  So poor was the college that it was kept going only by efforts, the success of which seemed miraculous interventions of Providence.  They were so regarded by Dr. Hargrave, and the stubbornest infidel must have conceded that he was not unjustified.

As Hargrave, tall and spare, his strong features illumined by life-long unselfish service to his fellow-men, came into Hiram Ranger’s presence, Hiram shrank and grew gray as his hair.  Hargrave might have been the officer come to lead him forth to execution.

“If you had not sent for me, Mr. Ranger,” he began, after the greetings, “I should have come of my own accord within a day or two.  Latterly God has been strongly moving me to lay before you the claims of my boys—­of the college.”

This was to Hiram direct confirmation of his own convictions.  He tried to force his lips to say so, but they would not move.