“But you don’t think the less of the other kind of work, sir, do you?” said Winthrop looking up; —­ “when one can get at it?”

“No, my boy,” said the father, —­ “no, Governor; no man thinks more highly of it than I do.  It has always been my desire that you and Will should be better off in this respect than I have ever been; —­ my great desire; and I haven’t given it up, neither.”

A little silence of all parties.

“What are the things which ‘really last,’ Rufus?” said his mother.

Rufus made some slight and not very direct answer, but the question set Winthrop to thinking.

He thought all the evening; or rather thought and fancy took a kind of whirligig dance, where it was hard to tell which was which.  Visions of better opportunities than his father ever had; —­ of reaching a nobler scale of being than his own early life had promised him; —­ of higher walks than his young feet had trod:  they made his heart big.  There came the indistinct possibility of raising up with him the little sister he held in his arms, not to the life of toil which their mother had led, but to some airy unknown region of cultivation and refinement and elegant leisure; —­ hugely unknown, and yet surely laid hold of by the mind’s want.  But though fancy saw her for a moment in some strange travestie of years and education and circumstances, that was only a flash of fancy —­ not dwelt upon.  Other thoughts were more near and pressing, though almost as vague.  In vain he endeavoured to calculate expenses that he did not know, wants that he could not estimate, difficulties that loomed up with no certain outline, means that were far beyond ken.  It was but confusion; except his purpose, clear and steady as the sun, though as yet it lighted not the way but only the distant goal; that was always in sight.  And under all these thoughts, little looked at yet fully recognized, his mother’s question; and a certain security that she had that which would ‘really last.’  He knew it.  And oddly enough, when he took his candle from her hand that night, Winthrop, though himself no believer unless with head belief, thanked God in his heart that his mother was a Christian.

Gradually the boys disclosed their plan; or rather the elder of the boys; for Winthrop being so much the younger, for the present was content to be silent.  But their caution was little needed.  Rufus was hardly more ready to go than his parents were to send him, —­ if they could; and in their case, as in his, the lack of power was made up by will.  Rufus should have an education.  He should go to College.  Not more cheerfully on his part than on theirs the necessary privations were met, the necessary penalty submitted to.  The son should stand on better ground than the father, though the father were himself the stepping-stone that he might reach it.

It had nothing to do with Winthrop, all this.  Nothing was said of him.  To send one son to College was already a great stretch of effort, and of possibility; to send two was far beyond both.  Nobody thought of it.  Except the one left out of their thoughts.