light, a hand resting on a shoulder of each.

"See," he said, "I want you two to help me to make up my mind."

"About going away?" asked Rupert, looking round at him quickly.

"Yes. Do you know we may have a pretty hard time? We've no money. We
should have to live scant enough, and, unless we had luck, we might come
back here worse off than we left."

"But we should have tried, and we should have been on the other side of
the mountains," said Sheba.

"So we should," said Tom, reflectively. "And there's a good deal in
seeing the other side of the mountains when people are young."

Sheba put her hand on his and looked at him with a glowing face.

"Uncle Tom," she said, "oh, let us go!"

"Uncle Tom," said Rupert, "I _must_ go!"

The line showed itself between his black brows again, though it was not a
frown. He put his hand in his pocket and held it out, open, with a
solitary twenty-dollar bill lying in it.

"That's all I've got," he said, "and that's borrowed. If the claim is
worth nothing, I must earn enough to pay it back. All right. We'll all
three go," said Tom.

The next day he began to develop the plans he had been allowing to form
vaguely as a background to his thoughts. They were not easy to carry out
in the existing condition of general poverty. But at Lucasville, some
forty miles distant, he was able to raise a mortgage on his land.

"If the worst comes to the worst," he said to Sheba, "after we have seen
the other side of the mountains, do you think you could stand it to come
back and live with me in the rooms behind the store?"

Sheba sat down upon his knee and put her arms round his neck, as she had
done when she was ten years old.

"I could live with you anywhere," she said. "The only thing I couldn't
stand would be to have to live away from you."

Tom laughed and kissed her. He laughed that he might smother a sigh.
Rupert was standing near and looking at her with the eyes that were so
like Delia Vanuxem's.

CHAPTER XXIV

For an imaginative or an untravelled person to approach the city of
Washington at sunrise on a radiant morning, is a thing far from unlikely
to be remembered, since a white and majestic dome, rising about a white
structure set high and supported by stately colonnades, the whole
gleaming fair against a background of blue sky, forms a picture which
does not easily melt away.

Those who reared this great temple of white stone and set it on a hilltop
to rule and wa