LITMIR.BIZ

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submissive way in which the country met winter. It made one contented, sad, too. He sealed his letter and lay down on the couch to read the paper, but was soon asleep.

      When he awoke the afternoon was already far gone. The clock on the shelf ticked loudly in the still room, the coal stove sent out a warm glow. The blooming plants in the south bow-window looked brighter and fresher than usual in the soft white light that came up from the snow. Mrs. Wheeler was reading by the west window, looking away from her book now and then to gaze off at the grey sky and the muffled fields. The creek made a winding violet chasm down through the pasture, and the trees followed it in a black thicket, curiously tufted with snow. Claude lay for some time without speaking, watching his mother’s profile against the glass, and thinking how good this soft, clinging snow-fall would be for his wheat fields.

      “What are you reading, Mother?” he asked presently.

      She turned her head toward him. “Nothing very new. I was just beginning “Paradise Lost” again. I haven’t read it for a long while.”

      “Read aloud, won’t you? Just wherever you happen to be. I like the sound of it.”

      Mrs. Wheeler always read deliberately, giving each syllable its full value. Her voice, naturally soft and rather wistful, trailed over the long measures and the threatening Biblical names, all familiar to her and full of meaning.

      “A dungeon horrible, on all sides round

      As one great furnace flamed; yet from the flames

      No light, but rather darkness visible

      Served only to discover sights of woe.”

      Her voice groped as if she were trying to realize something. The room was growing greyer as she read on through the turgid catalogue of the heathen gods, so packed with stories and pictures, so unaccountably glorious. At last the light failed, and Mrs. Wheeler closed the book.

      “That’s fine,” Claude commented from the couch. “But Milton couldn’t have got along without the wicked, could he?”

      Mrs. Wheeler looked up. “Is that a joke?” she asked slyly.

      “Oh no, not at all! It just struck me that this part is so much more interesting than the books about perfect innocence in Eden.”

      “And yet I suppose it shouldn’t be so,” Mrs. Wheeler said slowly, as if in doubt.

      Her son laughed and sat up, smoothing his rumpled hair. “The fact remains that it is, dear Mother. And if you took all the great sinners out of the Bible, you’d take out all the interesting characters, wouldn’t you?”

      “Except Christ,” she murmured.

      “Yes, except Christ. But I suppose the Jews were honest when they thought him the most dangerous kind of criminal.”

      “Are you trying to tangle me up?” his mother inquired, with both reproach and amusement in her voice.

      Claude went to the window where she was sitting, and looked out at the snowy fields, now becoming blue and desolate as the shadows deepened. “I only mean that even in the Bible the people who were merely free from blame didn’t amount to much.”

      “Ah, I see!” Mrs. Wheeler chuckled softly. “You are trying to get me back to Faith and Works. There’s where you always balked when you were a little fellow. Well, Claude, I don’t know as much about it as I did then. As I get older, I leave a good deal more to God. I believe He wants to save whatever is noble in this world, and that He knows more ways of doing it than I.” She rose like a gentle shadow and rubbed her cheek against his flannel shirt-sleeve, murmuring, “I believe He is sometimes where we would least expect to find Him, – even in proud, rebellious hearts.”

      For a moment they clung together in the pale, clear square of the west window, as the two natures in one person sometimes meet and cling in a fated hour.

      Chapter XVI

      Ralph and his father came home to spend the holidays, and on Christmas day Bayliss drove out from town for dinner. He arrived early, and after greeting his mother in the kitchen, went up to the sitting-room, which shone with a holiday neatness, and, for once, was warm enough for Bayliss, – having a low circulation, he felt the cold acutely. He walked up and down, jingling the keys in his pockets and admiring his mother’s winter chrysanthemums, which were still blooming. Several times he paused before the old-fashioned secretary, looking through the glass doors at the volumes within. The sight of some of those books awoke disagreeable memories. When he was a boy of fourteen or fifteen, it used to make him bitterly jealous to hear his mother coaxing Claude to read aloud to her. Bayliss had never been bookish. Even before he could read, when his mother told him stories, he at once began to prove to her how they could not possibly be true. Later he found arithmetic and geography more interesting than “Robinson Crusoe”. If he sat down with a book, he wanted to feel that he was learning something. His mother and Claude were always talking over his head about the people in books and stories.

      Though Bayliss had a sentimental feeling about coming home, he considered that he had had a lonely boyhood. At the country school he had not been happy; he was the boy who always got the answers to the test problems when the others didn’t, and he kept his arithmetic papers buttoned up in the inside pocket of his little jacket until he modestly handed them to the teacher, never giving a neighbour the benefit of his cleverness. Leonard Dawson and other lusty lads of his own age made life as terrifying for him as they could. In winter they used to throw him into a snow-drift, and then run away and leave him. In summer they made him eat live grasshoppers behind the schoolhouse, and put big bull-snakes in his dinner pail to surprise him. To this day, Bayliss liked to see one of those fellows get into difficulties that his big fists couldn’t get him out of.

      It was because Bayliss was quick at figures and undersized for a farmer that his father sent him to town to learn the implement business. From the day he went to work, he managed to live on his small salary. He kept in his vest pocket a little day-book wherein he noted down all his expenditures, – like the millionaire about whom the Baptist preachers were never tired of talking, – and his offering to the contribution box stood out conspicuous in his weekly account.

      In Bayliss’ voice, even when he used his insinuating drawl and said disagreeable things, there was something a little plaintive; the expression of a deep-seated sense of injury. He felt that he had always been misunderstood and underestimated. Later after he went into business for himself, the young men of Frankfort had never urged him to take part in their pleasures. He had not been asked to join the tennis club or the whist club. He envied Claude his fine physique and his unreckoning, impulsive vitality, as if they had been given to his brother by unfair means and should rightly have been his.

      Bayliss and his father were talking together before dinner when Claude came in and was so inconsiderate as to put up a window, though he knew his brother hated a draft. In a moment Bayliss addressed him without looking at him, “I see your friends, the Erlichs, have bought out the Jenkinson company, in Lincoln; at least, they’ve given their notes.”

      Claude had promised his mother to keep his temper today, “Yes, I saw it in the paper. I hope they’ll succeed.”

      “I doubt it.” Bayliss shook his head with his wisest look. “I understand they’ve put a mortgage on their home. That old woman will find herself without a roof one of these days.”

      “I don’t think so. The boys have wanted to go into business together for a long while. They are all intelligent and industrious; why shouldn’t they get on?” Claude flattered himself that he spoke in an easy, confidential way.

      Bayliss screwed up his eyes. “I expect they’re too fond of good living. They’ll pay their interest, and spend whatever’s left entertaining their friends. I didn’t see the young fellow’s name in the notice of incorporation, Julius, do they call him?”

      “Julius is going abroad to study this fall. He intends to be a professor.”

      “What’s the matter with him? Does he have poor health?”

      At this moment the dinner bell sounded, Ralph ran down

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