Norris flushed and impulsively laid his firm square hand over the slender one that was stretched upon the chair arm nearest him.

"You don't know how glad I am to be yours, and to have you for mine," he said. "I never knew my mother."

"You know then how Minnesota was a pioneer state, and how she sent a fifth of her population to the war, and Dad among the first? You know how the First Minnesota held the hill and turned the day at Gettysburg, though few of them lived to tell of their own bravery? It makes the lump come up in my throat even to remember it, just as it did when I first heard the news and knew that my boy-lover was there."

There was silence a moment.

"Ah, d.i.c.k, you have a young body to match your heart," Mrs. Percival went on, "but Dad, before he was twenty, carried a bullet in his side.

He had to conquer pain before he could spend strength on other things."

d.i.c.k rubbed his cheek with the mother's trembling hand.

"Yes," he said soberly, "it must have been harder to endure the sufferings that clung to him and killed him at last than it would have been to give everything in one swift sacrifice. Endurance,--that's a word I don't know, do I, mother?"

"No, dear, that's the word you know least; but you'll have to learn it."

"Ellery, I guess that's where you have the advantage of me." d.i.c.k looked up with a smile.

"If I have, it's been a dour lesson," Norris answered with a wry face.

"Well, if Dad gave his life to his country by dying, I mean to give mine by living," d.i.c.k went on. "There must be things that need doing."

"More than there are men to do them," said his mother softly. "You have his spirit and his genius. You have health, too. Don't put a bullet in your young manhood."

"What do you mean, mother?"

"There are a thousand wounds besides those from a gun. I'm counting on you to live his life as he would have liked to live it--to be his son, d.i.c.k."

"You mustn't expect the sun and the moon to stand still before me."

"Oh, well, I dare say I'm as foolish as other mothers." Mrs. Percival laughed as though she must do that or cry. "But you were certainly born to something, d.i.c.k. You've shown it ever since you organized your first militia company and whipped the five-year-olds in the next street."

"And he's kept right on bossing his particular gang ever since. Richard Dux," smiled Ellery.

The boy grinned up at them, and his mind traveled to those later days when that leadership of his was so easily acknowledged as to be axiomatic. He saw in panorama the stormy joys of college life with the victories of the field. He beheld again the quieter hours when the young men saw visions together and felt themselves called to put shoulder to the car of righteousness, while they discussed with the sublime self-sufficiency of inexperience the politics and sociology of the world. The fellows all believed in him as one of those who are destined to be prime pushers at the wheel. Perhaps he would be among those conquerors who climb aboard and ride, forgetful of the plodding crowd which toils at the drudgery of progress but does not taste its glory. So many oblivions go to make one reputation.

d.i.c.k knew that power was in him. To others it showed in his unconscious self-confidence of carriage, in his eyes that glowed, in the electric something that compelled attraction.

But now college visions were fading into "the light of common day". The boys had gone home to be men. Success began to look not like an aurora, but like a solid structure built of bricks that must be carried in hods.

Hods are uninspiring objects.

d.i.c.k stared at the pile of unlit logs in the fireplace and felt the rhythmic strokes of his mother's hand upon his well-thatched head as she watched him in sympathetic silence; but he saw the eyes of his fellow cla.s.smen and felt their good-by hand-clasps. Again the train thumped with monotonous rolling as it brought him ever westward and homeward.

Farm after farm, village and town, city upon city, long level prairies that cried out of fertility, the rush and roar and chaos of Chicago, and then more cities and rivers and hills and lakes, and now the blessed restfulness of home and twilight. He had seen it all many times before--two thousand miles of s.p.a.ce to be covered between New Haven and St. Etienne. On this last journey it had taken on a new significance to his eyes,--a significance which matched his dreams. It was instinct with meaning of which he was a part.

This was his country, huge, half-formed, needing men. Its bigness was not an accident of geography, but a pregnant fact in the consciousness of a people as wide as itself. Thousands of redmen once covered it, and it was then only a big place, not a great country. It must be a mighty race who would master those miles of inert earth.

G.o.d breathed His spirit into the earth and it became a living man.

Man--His image--must breathe the spirit into the earth and make it a living civilization.

His father, with a Gettysburg bullet bruising his life, had nevertheless played the part, and done his share toward turning a frontier village into a n.o.ble city. With a thrill d.i.c.k saw himself building the structure higher on its firm foundations, making it great enough to match the wide fertile acres that lay about it, and the dazzling Minnesota sky that hung above. So he built his castle of achievement in the air, where his own glory lay mistily behind his service to his fellow men. Already the thing seemed done--vague and yet, somehow, concrete.

"Pooh, what is time? A mere figment of the imagination!" exclaimed d.i.c.k suddenly. "Was it day before yesterday that I came home? Forty-eight hours have put a gulf between the old and the new me. Condensed time,--just add hot water and it swells to six times its original bulk."

His mother smiled indulgently at her son's vagaries of speech, and he went on:

"Moreover, I've been away four years,--years of vast importance, it seems to me. I come back and everything is going on in the same old way.

Every one is interested in the same old things. They don't seem to think anything exciting has happened, except that the city has doubled in size and there has been another presidential election. They aren't a bit stirred up over me. They aren't even deeply moved because Ellery over there is wielding an inexperienced editorial pen. Everything is familiar, but I've forgotten it all. It's hard to pick up the threads."

"More than that, boys. The threads are not all done up in a neat bunch and handed to you as they are in New Haven. St. Etienne's point of view is not always that of the gentleman and the scholar. Its great men are not of the campus, but those who control the destinies of others, sometimes by wealth, oftener by the genius of power. But, after all, this is the real world."

d.i.c.k laughed again.

"And a world after my own heart, mother."

"Yes, I think you will fit in," she said with maternal complacency.

"Both of you," she added with sudden remembrance.

"The fitting-in on my part will have to be a process of swelling, I guess," Norris said whimsically. "Small and narrow as is the berth I have at the _Star_ office, I shall have to be bigger than I am before I fill it."

"Oh, you're all right. You're fundamentally all right, and that means you'll rise to every opportunity you get." d.i.c.k's voice took on some of the patronage of a leader for his follower. "I'd bank on Ellery Norris if the rest of the world turned sour."

"Thanks," said Ellery briefly, and their eyes met in that interchange of a.s.surance which is the masculine American equivalent for embrace and eternal protestation. Mrs. Percival smiled to herself, amused yet pleased by the frank boyish affection.

"What kind of a time did you have at Mr. Early's reception?" she asked abruptly.

"Oh, it was a circus with three rings. In the middle ring there was a performing hippopotamus of a Hindu. He was really a sunburst. Then in the farthest ring there were a thousand women with big hats, all talking at once. But in the nearest there were just Madeline and Mrs. Lenox, and that was a good show. By Jove! Madeline is prettier than ever, and hasn't found it out yet. That's the advantage of sending a girl off to a women's college where there is no man to enlighten her."

"Pretty! That's not the word to describe Miss Elton. She's too simple and dignified," remonstrated Norris.

"Bowled over already, are you?" d.i.c.k jeered.

"Ellery is quite right," Mrs. Percival interrupted. "Madeline has something Easter-lily-like about her."

"You grow enthusiastic, mother."

"I love her very dearly, d.i.c.k."

"Norris and I are going out to see her to-morrow. We'll take the motor, I guess."

Mrs. Percival beamed down at him and gave his head an affectionate pat, and the son glanced up with a blandness that might easily have become a smirk. Yet his mother's complacent satisfaction with the inevitable irritated him. Madeline Elton might be the most admirable combination of the virtues and the graces, but he wanted to find it out for himself.

Mrs. Percival rose with the air of one who has heard and said what she desired.

"Good night, dear boy," she purred as d.i.c.k struggled to his long legs.

"How good it is to have you to lean on and trust! These have been lonely years while you were away. Now I shall leave you two to your quiet smoke."

d.i.c.k kissed her hand and then her lips, as though to show both reverence and love. Norris, too, stooped and kissed her hand, and the two watched her as she moved in her slow way up the stairs. As she disappeared, Norris turned and laid an arm over d.i.c.k's shoulder.

"That's the kind of thing, Percival, that you do not wholly appreciate unless you've gone without it. I grew up without any atmosphere to speak of, and I've been gasping for breath all my life. I wonder if I shall ever get a full allowance of air to live in."