Half frowning and half smiling she began to talk of her work in town.  “What is there about her,” Roger asked, “that reminds me so of my mother?” His mind strayed back into the past while the low quiet voice of his daughter went on, and a wistful expression crept over his face.  What would she do with the family name?  What life would she lead in those many years?...  “What a mother she would make.”  The words rose from within him, but in a voice which was not his own.  It was Deborah’s grandmother speaking, so clearly and distinctly that he gave a start almost of alarm.

“And if you don’t believe they’ll do it,” Deborah was saying, “you don’t know what’s in children.  Only we’ve got to help bring it out.”  What had she been talking about?  He remembered the words “a new nation”—­no more.  “We’ve got to grope around in the dark and hunt for new ways and learn as we go.  And when you’ve once got into the work and really felt the thrill of it all—­well, then it seems rather foolish and small to bother about your own little life.”

* * * * *

Roger spent much of his time alone.  He took long rides on William along crooked, hilly roads.  As the afternoon drew to its end, the shadows would creep up the mountain sides to their summits where glowed the last rays of the sun, painting the slate and granite crags in lovely pink and purple hues.  And sometimes mighty banks of clouds would rear themselves high overhead, gigantic mountains of the air with billowy, misty caverns, cliffs and jagged peaks, all shifting there before his eyes.  And he would think of Judith his wife.  And the old haunting certainty, that her soul had died with her body, was gone.  There came to him the feeling that he and his wife would meet again.  Why did this hope come back to him?  Was it all from the glory of the sun?  Or was it from the presence, silent and invisible, of those many other mortals, folk of his own flesh and blood, who at their deaths had gone to their graves to put on immortality?  Or was this deepening faith in Roger simply a sign of his growing old age?

He frowned at the thought and shook it off, and again stared up at the light on the hills.  “You will live on in our children’s lives.”  Was there no other immortality?

He often thought of his boyhood here.  On a ride one day he stopped for a drink at a spring in a grove of maples surrounding a desolate farmhouse not more than a mile away from his own.  And through the trees as he turned to go he saw the stark figure of a woman, poorly clad and gaunt and gray.  She stood motionless watching him with a look of sullen bitterness.  She was the last of “the Elkinses,” a mountain family run to seed.  As he rode away he saw in the field a boy with a pitchfork in his hands, a meager ragged little chap.  He was staring into the valley at a wriggling, blue smoke serpent made by the night express to New York.  And something leaped in Roger, for he had once felt just like that!