Tom Burton rose from his chair and took two or three turns across the frayed strips of carpet.  His eyes were no longer the eyes of a father irritated by the insubordinate fret of a fledgling son begging permission to test his wings.  His bearded face bore the seamed uncertainty of his deeply vexed spirit.  Perhaps in that moment there came to him some sense of conversion to the prophet-like assurance of his son.  Perhaps he felt the dread of transplanting and a vague wonder whether the gifts of wealth, if they came, might not bring disaster in their wake.  At last he turned, cramming his hands into his trousers’ pockets, and swept the little family circle with eyes in which flashed something of patriarchal fire.

“Mother,” he demanded, “you have heard what the boy says.  Does it sound like reason to you, or is it just a stripling’s restlessness?”

Elizabeth Burton looked from her husband’s face to that of her eldest child.  It seemed to her that the father’s eyes were wistful and sorely distressed, and that the son’s face was tightly drawn with a feverish burning of the eyes.  Suddenly she felt like an arbiter called to judge between them.  Her boy with his Caesar’s ambition was breaking his heart to go.  Her husband, with much of life behind, could only yield with something like a break in his own.  Her eyes moistened.

“If he feels called into the world, Tom—­” she began, then halted.  The husband waited, and she went on again.  “If he feels it so strong, maybe it must mean something.  It’s mighty hard to say.  But, Tom, I know Ham better than anybody else does.  He’s not the kind of boy to leave us alone.  If we need him he’ll stay.”

“That’s not the question, mother.”  The father who had yesterday been dictatorial and intolerant was now the just judge who refused to be beguiled by personal preferences.  Only his pupils betrayed the pathos of his inward suffering.  “It’s a right hard question as I see it.  This place means home to me, but I’m about played out.  If we stay it’s Ham that’s got to wear the harness, an’ I know just how heavy the harness is.  It would gall him an’ blister him even if he wasn’t already chafin’ with discontent.  It seems like he can’t do it willin’ly.  Can we let him do it any other way?  We’re lookin’ back, mother, but I reckon life runs forward.”

“It ain’t just my life I’m thinkin’ about—­” broke in Ham’s voice, but his father stopped him with an uplifted hand.

“You’ve had your say, son, for the present,” he reminded; and the boy fell silent.

Tom Burton turned to the maiden aunt who sat under the lamplight with her sewing on her lap.  He saw that her lips were intolerantly compressed and that her needle came and went in protesting little jabs.  “Hannah,” he quietly inquired, “what do you think?”

The elderly woman whose sternness of view had been tempered by neither maternity nor breadth of experience shook her head.