“They will, Tom.  They will.  Ham may talk, but he won’t desert.”

“I know that, but the question is, have we got the right to hold them here?  Is Ham raving, or is he right?  That’s the question you an’ me have got to decide, mother.”

“Do you think, Tom,” she demanded, rising and anxiously looking at him, “do you think that even if we had all the things money could give us—­we’d be any happier in the long run?  Life’s been hard with us, but it’s always been wholesome.”

“I’m contented, mother, but what does well enough for old blood may not satisfy the young.  It ain’t the first time I’ve thought about this thing.  They’re quittin’ all round us, an’ they’re quittin’ because they’re beat.  I’ve always thought this country could be redeemed.  If boys like Ham thought so, too, it might be done, but it takes young blood, and if a feller’s heart ain’t in it, he can’t do it.”

Her only answer was a sigh, and he continued:  “We’ve still got enough laid by in the bank to live somewhere for a few years an’ give the children decent educations.  If we stay here too long maybe we can’t even do that.  What shall we do?”

For a while they sat without talk, and then the mother brokenly suggested:  “Let’s hear what Ham says an’ let’s make up our minds slow.”

Together they rose, and, blowing out the lamp, went up the stairs.  As they passed Ham’s door they paused, and the father whispered, “I don’t want the boy to think I’m hard on him.”

Inside, there was no light, but they could hear the eldest son thrashing restlessly about in his bed, and they knew that he was not sleeping.

Outside the snow was still falling with quiet relentlessness.  It was wrapping deeper and deeper the white slopes of the mountains and piling feathery drifts against the windward sides of the sighing pines.  Here and there a burdened branch creaked under its travail.  Now and then the wind that drove the snow rose to a gusty whisper, and a stark limb scraped the eaves of the house with grating, lifeless fingers.  But between the occasional stress-cries of the storm, there came the low, dirge-like monotony of the sifting snowfall.  And as always in old houses there were the little voices and the minute nameless stirrings of the night.  The ghost-moan of drafty chimneys and the creak of warped timbers became audible accentuators of the silence.

Ham heard them all and to him they were like the wretched echoes of a jail where the small clicking night-sounds creep into dreams and poison them with reminders of confinement.  His brain was hot with a fever of restiveness and beyond his cell-like room he saw the world from which he was barred:  the world which the tongueless voice in his heart kept heralding to him as his own world to conquer.

In another bed across the carpetless floor rose and fell the even breath of Edwardes, who was sleeping as a man sleeps after fighting a blizzard.  Under the boy’s own hot cheek was the roughness of a slipless pillow and his limbs thrashed between coarse sheets that covered a lumpy mattress.