In the Burton household that fall, a leaven was working. Mary's
mismatched eyes held a tranquillity of quiet self-satisfaction. She had
found somewhere a second fashion magazine and often when she was alone
in the little room under the eaves she snipped industriously away at the
imaginary patterns of gorgeous gowns, or listened to the fervent
pleadings of make-believe suitors.

But the secret was all her own of how something in her had awakened.
This little girl would never again be precisely the same Mary Burton who
had started out that Saturday afternoon with a heart full of rebellion
and who had come back appeased.

And Ham, his mother feared, was finding his burdens too heavy for young
shoulders. He had made no complaint, but an expression of settled
abstraction had come into his face and at home he was always silent.

After the falling of the first heavy snow neither Paul nor Mary ventured
out to school, but Ham's avid hunger for education lost no coveted day
of the term. When his morning work was ended, wrapped in patched
mackinaw and traveling on snowshoes, he made the trip across the white
slopes, where only the pines were green, and came back at the day's end
for his evening chores. The trip was a bit shortened now because the
lake was ice-locked and he could cross between the flag-marked holes of
the pickerel-fishers. He had been afraid to speak of those things which
were burning consumingly in his mind; afraid that if once he let slip
the leash of restraint he would be carried away on a tide of passion.
But some day he must speak, and, strangely enough, the match that
lighted the train of powder was the second coming of the young man who