Ernest, too, said “it’s the best life in the world, Claude.”

But if you went to bed defeated every night, and dreaded to wake in the morning, then clearly it was too good a life for you.  To be assured, at his age, of three meals a day and plenty of sleep, was like being assured of a decent burial.  Safety, security; if you followed that reasoning out, then the unborn, those who would never be born, were the safest of all; nothing could happen to them.

Claude knew, and everybody else knew, seemingly, that there was something wrong with him.  He had been unable to conceal his discontent.  Mr. Wheeler was afraid he was one of those visionary fellows who make unnecessary difficulties for themselves and other people.  Mrs. Wheeler thought the trouble with her son was that he had not yet found his Saviour.  Bayliss was convinced that his brother was a moral rebel, that behind his reticence and his guarded manner he concealed the most dangerous opinions.  The neighbours liked Claude, but they laughed at him, and said it was a good thing his father was well fixed.  Claude was aware that his energy, instead of accomplishing something, was spent in resisting unalterable conditions, and in unavailing efforts to subdue his own nature.  When he thought he had at last got himself in hand, a moment would undo the work of days; in a flash he would be transformed from a wooden post into a living boy.  He would spring to his feet, turn over quickly in bed, or stop short in his walk, because the old belief flashed up in him with an intense kind of hope, an intense kind of pain,—­the conviction that there was something splendid about life, if he could but find it.

IX

The weather, after the big storm, behaved capriciously.  There was a partial thaw which threatened to flood everything,—­then a hard freeze.  The whole country glittered with an icy crust, and people went about on a platform of frozen snow, quite above the level of ordinary life.  Claude got out Mr. Wheeler’s old double sleigh from the mass of heterogeneous objects that had for years lain on top of it, and brought the rusty sleighbells up to the house for Mahailey to scour with brick dust.  Now that they had automobiles, most of the farmers had let their old sleighs go to pieces.  But the Wheelers always kept everything.

Claude told his mother he meant to take Enid Royce for a sleigh-ride.  Enid was the daughter of Jason Royce, the grain merchant, one of the early settlers, who for many years had run the only grist mill in Frankfort county.  She and Claude were old playmates; he made a formal call at the millhouse, as it was called, every summer during his vacation, and often dropped in to see Mr. Royce at his town office.