"He is not going," said Sara promptly. "I have other plans for him,"
with a beseeching look at the boy, who avoided her eye.

"Wall, in course, jest es ye say, but I do s'pose, ef Reub Olmstead was
alive naow, his word would be go."

Sara winced. During all this struggle she had been cruelly hampered by
her feeling that, possibly, she was acting entirely against what was
likely to have been her dead father's wishes, and now this fear rose so
strongly again as almost to paralyze her.

"If he were only here--if I could put the responsibility into his
hands--if I had any one," she was saying to herself, when there came a
thought that calmed her, as the mother's voice calms a frightened child.
"I have a Father; why don't I put it in his hands?"

Her rigid face relaxed into a lovely smile, and, looking at her brother
with the winning sweetness she could assume at times, she said,--

"I will say no more about this matter, Morton; you have only our
heavenly Father to answer to now. Decide as you think is right. Uncle
Jabez, will you give him till to-morrow?"

"Sartain, sartain; and, see here, my boy: I'm free to say I've urged ye
to go, fur I need a clipper-built little feller like you; but I say
naow, ef I hed as good a sister's you've got, I'd think twicet afore I
went agin her, an' thet's the truth."

There was no mistaking his earnestness; and as he picked up his old
tarpaulin, and shook hands with Sara in farewell, the respect and