After his departure their fright and apprehensions settled on Mrs. Meredith.  They ranged themselves on chairs side by side against a wall, and sat confronting her like a class in the public school fated to be examined in deadly branches.  None moved except when she spoke, and then all writhed together but each in a different way; the most comforting word from her produced a family spasm with individual proclivities.  Rowan tried to talk with the father about crops:  they were frankly embarrassed.  What can a young man with two thousand acres of the best land say to an old man with fifty of the poorest?

The mother and son drove home in silence.  She drew one of his hands into her lap and held it with close pressure.  They did not look at each other.

As the carriage rolled easily over the curved driveway, through the noble forest trees they caught glimpses of the house now standing clear in afternoon sunshine.  Each had the same thought of how empty it waited there without Dent—­henceforth less than a son, yet how much more; more than brother, but how much less.  How a brief ceremony can bind separated lives and tear bound ones apart!

“Rowan,” she said, as they walked slowly from the carriage to the porch, she having clasped his arm more intimately, “there is something I have wanted to do and have been trying to do for a long time.  It must not be put off any longer.  We must go over the house this afternoon.  There are a great many things that I wish to show you and speak to you about—­things that have to be divided between you and Dent.”

“Not to-day! not to-day!” he cried, turning to her with quick appeal.  But she shook her head slowly, with brave cheerfulness.

“Yes; to-day.  Now; and then we shall be over with it.  Wait for me here.”  She passed down the long hall to her bedroom, and as she disappeared he rushed into the parlors and threw himself on a couch with his hands before his face; then he sprang up and came out into the hall again and waited with a quiet face.

When she returned, smiling, she brought with her a large bunch of keys, and she took his arm dependently as they went up the wide staircase.  She led him to the upper bedrooms first—­in earlier years so crowded and gay with guests, but unused during later ones.  The shutters were closed, and the afternoon sun shot yellow shafts against floors and walls.  There was a perfume of lavender, of rose leaves.

“Somewhere in one of these closets there is a roll of linen.”  She opened one after another, looking into each.  “No; it is not here.  Then it must be in there.  Yes; here it is.  This linen was spun and woven from flax grown on your great-great-grandfather’s land.  Look at it!  It is beautifully made.  Each generation of the family has inherited part and left the rest for generations yet to come.  Half of it is yours, half is Dent’s.  When it has been divided until there is no longer enough to divide, that will be the last of the home-made linen of the old time.  It was a good time, Rowan; it produced masterful men and masterful women, not mannish women.  Perhaps the golden age of our nation will some day prove to have been the period of the home-spun Americans.”