Upon Paul, with his measureless faith in his brother and his passion for dreams, the mad arrogance of the declaration was lost.  The ecstasy with which Ham spoke tinged the promise with a fire of conviction—­so that Paul wondered and believed.

CHAPTER III

In the Burton household that fall, a leaven was working.  Mary’s mismatched eyes held a tranquillity of quiet self-satisfaction.  She had found somewhere a second fashion magazine and often when she was alone in the little room under the eaves she snipped industriously away at the imaginary patterns of gorgeous gowns, or listened to the fervent pleadings of make-believe suitors.

But the secret was all her own of how something in her had awakened.  This little girl would never again be precisely the same Mary Burton who had started out that Saturday afternoon with a heart full of rebellion and who had come back appeased.

And Ham, his mother feared, was finding his burdens too heavy for young shoulders.  He had made no complaint, but an expression of settled abstraction had come into his face and at home he was always silent.

After the falling of the first heavy snow neither Paul nor Mary ventured out to school, but Ham’s avid hunger for education lost no coveted day of the term.  When his morning work was ended, wrapped in patched mackinaw and traveling on snowshoes, he made the trip across the white slopes, where only the pines were green, and came back at the day’s end for his evening chores.  The trip was a bit shortened now because the lake was ice-locked and he could cross between the flag-marked holes of the pickerel-fishers.  He had been afraid to speak of those things which were burning consumingly in his mind; afraid that if once he let slip the leash of restraint he would be carried away on a tide of passion.  But some day he must speak, and, strangely enough, the match that lighted the train of powder was the second coming of the young man who had met Mary on the road.

He came near nightfall, on snowshoes, and when he knocked it was the girl who opened the door.  At first, she did not recognize him because the mountain tan had given way to a pallor of recent illness and the face was very thin.  But as soon as he smiled, the whimsical eyes proclaimed him.

“You—­you haven’t died yet,” Mary Burton spoke instinctively, and stood holding the door open to the blustering of the sharp wind, quite forgetful that she was barring his way.  But the young man who had come out of the thickening twilight laughed.  He shook the snow off his mackinaw, for a fresh downfall was making the air almost as white as the drifts below.

“Not yet,” he assured her, “but unless you let me come in out of the cold I shall probably perish on your doorstep.”