k in town. "What
is there about her," Roger asked, "that reminds me so of my mother?" His
mind strayed back into the past while the low quiet voice of his daughter
went on, and a wistful expression crept over his face. What would she do
with the family name? What life would she lead in those many years?...
"What a mother she would make." The words rose from within him, but in a
voice which was not his own. It was Deborah's grandmother speaking, so
clearly and distinctly that he gave a start almost of alarm.

"And if you don't believe they'll do it," Deborah was saying, "you don't
know what's in children. Only we've got to help bring it out." What had she
been talking about? He remembered the words "a new nation"--no more. "We've
got to grope around in the dark and hunt for new ways and learn as we go.
And when you've once got into the work and really felt the thrill of it
all--well, then it seems rather foolish and small to bother about your own
little life."

* * * * *

Roger spent much of his time alone. He took long rides on William along
crooked, hilly roads. As the afternoon drew to its end, the shadows would
creep up the mountain sides to their summits where glowed the last rays of
the sun, painting the slate and granite crags in lovely pink and purple
hues. And sometimes mighty banks of clouds would rear themselves high
overhead, gigantic mountains of the air with billowy, misty caverns, cliffs
and jagged peaks, all shifting there before his eyes. And he would think of
Judith his wife. And the old haunting certainty, that her soul had died
with her body, was gone. There came to him the feeling that he and his wife
would meet again. Why did this hope come back to him? Was it all from the
glory of the sun? Or was it from the presence, silent and invisible, of
those many other mortals, folk of his own flesh and blood, who at their
deaths had gone to their graves to put on immortality? Or was this
deepening faith in Roger simply a sign of his growing old age?

He frowned at the thought and shook it off, and again stared up at the
light on the hills. "You will live on in our children's lives." Was there
no other immortality?

He often thought of his boyhood here. On a ride one day he stopped for a
drink at a spring in a grove of maples surrounding a desolate farmhouse not
more than a mile away from his own. And through the trees as he turned to
go he saw the stark figure of a woman,