His eldest son rose and paced the floor with the restlessness of a caged leopard.  At the black window he halted to gaze out on the bitterness of the night.  The ultimatum of his father’s obstinacy galled him beyond endurance.  He heard himself pledged to the emptiness and futility of a life-sentence which he loathed; from which he was seeking escape and his soul clamored to rise in its vehement repudiation.  Yet he felt that just now his heart was in too hot a conflagration to make speech safe.  If he spoke at this moment he must speak in violent passion and bitter denunciation, and so with his hands tautly clutched at his back he held his counsel and paced the floor.  Old Tom Burton’s unaccustomed hours in the confinement of convalescence had left him petulant.  The courtesy of the stranger’s argument was lost upon him.  All he saw was that it was argument, and he was in a condition to be irritated by little things.

For a while he watched the restless wanderings of his son from window to stove and from stove back to window, then his voice broke out sharply in dictatorial peevishness.

“What ails you, boy?” he demanded.  “Have you got St. Vitus’ dance?  Sit down an’ quit frettin’ people with your eternal trampin’ about.”

Even then, though his face was white with suppressed feeling, Ham held hard to the curb of silence and took a chair, apart, where he sat rigid.

“It’s them that sticks to their guns that wins out,” declared the bearded man, looking around as if challenging contradiction, and, when none came, frowning on in silence.  Then suddenly his eyes fell on the figure of little Mary, who sat behind the table with her thin face resting in her hands and her eyes burning with thoughts of that great wonder-world which their visitor knew so well.  His presence in the room seemed to the child to bring its marvels almost within touch.  For the first time the father recognized the ludicrous massing of coils on the top of the little head instead of the simple braids that should be falling over her shoulders, and, in his mood of irritation, the affectation of grown-up adornment angered him inordinately.

“What damned foolishness is that?” he demanded.  “What started you to putting on a lot of new airs all of a sudden?  Do you think you’re the Queen of Sheba?”

The girl shrank back into the shadows at the edge of the room, and, as young Edwardes glanced that way, he heard a muffled sob and knew that she had fled up the stairs in chagrin, a pitiful little would-be princess whose dream splendor had been shattered with a reprimand.  His intuition told him that she already lay curled up on her bed, sobbing bitterly against the pillow where the coiled hair—­now angrily torn down from its burnished coronal—­lay heaped and tangled about her head.

“I’m afraid,” volunteered the guest with deep embarrassment, “I’m to blame.  I met Mary on the roadside once as I went down to the city, and she told me how the children had been teasing her because she wasn’t pretty, I tried to comfort her with a prophecy that her wonderful eyes and hair would establish her claims to beauty.”