them, but Mother Marshall never said anything
about it; she just kept it there, and it comforted her to feel it; one
of those little homely, tangible things that our poor souls have to
tether to sometimes when we lose the vision and get faint-hearted.
Mother Marshall wasn't morbid one bit. She always looked on the bright
side of everything; and she had had much joy in her son as he was
growing up. She had seen him strong of body, strong of soul, keen of
mind. He had won the scholarship of the whole Northwest to the big
Eastern university. It had been hard to pack him up and have him go away
so far, where she couldn't hope to see him soon, where she couldn't
listen for his whistle coming home at night, where he couldn't even come
back for Sunday and sit in the old pew in church with them. But those
things had to come. It was the only way he could grow and fulfil his
part of God's plan. And so she put away her tears till he was gone, and
kept them for the old felt hat when Father was out about the farm. And
then when the news came that Stephen had graduated so soon, gone up
higher to God's eternal university to live and work among the great,
even then her soul had been big enough to see the glory of it behind the
sorrow, and say with trembling, conquering lips: "I shall go to him, but
he shall not return to me. The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away.
Blessed be the name of the Lord!"

That was the kind of nerve that blessed little Mother Marshall was built
with, and it was only in such times as these, when Father had gone to
town and stayed a little later than usual, that the tears in her heart
got the better of her and she laid her face against the old felt hat.

Down the road in the gloom moved a dark speck. It couldn't be Father,
for he had gone in the machine--the nice, comfortable little car that
Stephen had made them get before he went away to college, because he
said that Father needed to have things easier now. Father would be in
the machine, and by this time the lights would be lit. Father was very
careful always about lighting up when it grew dusk. He had a great
horror of accidents to other people. Not that he was afraid for himself,
no indeed. Father was a _man_! The kind of a man to be the father of a
Stephen!

The speck grew larger. It made a chugging noise. It was one of those
horrible motor-cycles. Mother Marshall hated them, though she had never
revealed the fact. Stephen had wanted one, had said