“What mark are you aiming at, boys? —­ what are you setting before you as the object of life?”

“What mark, mother?” said Rufus after an instant’s pause.

“Yes.”

“To make something of myself!” he said rising, and with that fire-flashing nostril and lip that spoke his whole soul at work.  “I have a chance now, and it will go hard but I will accomplish it.”

The mother’s eye turned to her other son.

“I believe I must say the same, mother,” he replied gravely.  “I have perhaps some notion of doing, afterwards; but the first thing is to be myself what I can be.  I am not, I feel, a tithe of that now.”

“I agree with you —­ you are right, so far,” answered the mother, turning her face again to the fire; —­ “but in the end, what is it you would do, and would be?”

“Profession, do you mean, mamma?” said Rufus.

“No,” she said; and he needed not to ask any more.

“I mean, what is all this for? —­ what purpose lies behind all this?”

“To distinguish myself!” said Rufus, —­ “if I can, —­ in some way.”

“I am afraid it is no better than that with me, mother,” said Winthrop; “though perhaps I should rather say my desire is to be distinguished.”

“What’s the difference?” said his brother.

“I don’t know.  I think I feel a difference.”

“I am not going to preach to you now,” said Mrs. Landholm, and yet the slight failing of her voice did it —­ how lastingly! —­ “I cannot, —­ and I need not.  Only one word.  If you sow and reap a crop that will perish in the using, what will you do when it is gone? —­ and remember it is said of the redeemed, that their works do follow them.  Remember that. —­ One word more,” she said after a pause.  “Let me have it to say in that day, —­ ‘Of all which thou gavest me have I lost none’! —­”

Not preach to them?  And what was her hidden face and bowed head? —­ a preaching the like of which they were never to hear from mortal voices.  But not a word, not a lisp, fell from one of them.  Winifred had run off; the rest hardly stirred; till Mrs. Landholm rose up, and gravely kissing one and the other prepared to leave the room.

“Where is Winifred?” said her brother suddenly missing her.

“I don’t know.  I am sure she is somewhere praying for you.”

They said no more, even to each other, that night.

Nor much the next day.  It was the time for doing, not thinking.  There was not indeed much to do, except to get off; but that seemed a great deal.  It was done at last.  Mrs. Landholm from the window of the kitchen watched them get into the wagon and drive off; and then she sat down by the window to cry.

Asahel had gone to ride as far as the mountain’s foot with his father and brothers; and Winifred knelt down beside her mother to lean her head upon her; they could not get near enough just then.  It was only to help each other weep, for neither could comfort the other nor be comforted, for a time.  Yet the feeling of the two, like as it seemed outwardly, was far unlike within.  In the child it was the spring flood of a little brook, bringing, to be sure, momentary desolation; in the mother it was the flow of the great sea, still and mighty.  And when it grew outwardly quiet, the same depth was there.