For answer the boy pulled her eagerly to the window and pointed to a young pine-tree that stood near the house.

“Sister, that tree’s just as old as I be.  I’ve prayed to God, and I’ve promised myself that before it’s as tall, as the ridge-pole of the house, I’ll be on my way.”

As this scene came before his eyes, the white-haired man, leaning against the great pine, looked up at the lofty crown of green wreathing the giant’s head and shook his fist at it.  He hated every inch of its height, for every inch meant an enforced renunciation that had brought him bitterness and a sense of failure.

His sister had died the year after she had given him the double text, and his father the year after that.  He was left thus, the sole support of his ailing mother, who transferred to the silent, sullen boy the irresistible rule of complaining weakness with which she had governed his father.  It was thought she could not live long, and the boy stood in terror of a sudden death brought on by displeasure at some act of his.  In the end, however, she died quietly in her bed, an old woman of seventy-three, nursed by her daughter-in-law, the widow of Jehiel’s only brother.  Her place in the house was taken by Jehiel’s sister-in-law, a sickly, helpless woman, alone in the would except for Jehiel, and all the neighbors congratulated him on having a housekeeper ready to his hand.  He said nothing.

By that time, indeed, he had sunk into a harsh silence on all topics.  He went through the exhausting routine of farming with an iron-like endurance, watched with set lips the morning and afternoon trains leave the valley, and noted the growth of the pine-tree with a burning heart.  His only recreation was collecting time-tables, prospectuses of steamship companies, and what few books of travel he could afford.  The only society he did not shun was that of itinerant peddlers or tramps, and occasionally a returned missionary on a lecture tour.

And always the pine-tree had grown, insolent in the pride of a creature set in the right surroundings.  The imprisoned man had felt himself dwarfed by its height.  But now, he looked up at it again, and laughed aloud.  It had come late, but it had come.  He was fifty-seven years old, almost three-score, but all his life was still to be lived.  He said to himself that some folks lived their lives while they did their work, but he had done all his tasks first, and now he could live.  The unexpected arrival of the timber merchant and the sale of that piece of land he’d never thought would bring him a cent—­was not that an evident sign that Providence was with him.  He was too old and broken now to work his way about as he had planned at first, but here had come this six hundred dollars like rain from the sky.  He would start as soon as he could sell his stock.