in the parlor below. She sat down in a
chair placed back against the wall and folded her hands in her lap.
No, it was not so hard for Mary Ballard. It would not be, even if she
had a son old enough to go. Mary had work to do.

On the wall above Hester's head was one of the portraits which helped
to establish the family dignity of the Craigmiles. If the blinds had
been open, one could have seen it in sharp contrast to the pale moth
of a woman who sat beneath it. The painting, warm and rich in tone,
was of a dame in a long-bodiced dress. She held a fan in her hand and
wore feathers in her powdered hair. Her eyes gazed straight across the
room into those of a red-coated soldier who wore a sword at his side
and gold on his shoulders. Yes, there had been soldiers in the family
before Peter Junior's time.

This was Peter Junior's room, but the boy was there no longer. He had
come home from college one day and had entered it a boy, and then he
came out of it and down to his mother, dressed in his new uniform--a
man. Now he entered it no more, for he stayed at the camp over on the
high bluff of the Wisconsin River. He was wholly taken up with his new
duties there, and his room had been set in order and closed as if he
were dead.

Sitting there, Hester heard the church clock peal out the hour of
twelve, and started. Soon she would hear the front door open and shut,
and a heavy tread along the lower hall, and she would go down and sit
silently at the table opposite her husband, they two alone. There
would be silence, because there would be nothing to say. He loved her
and was tender of her, but his word was law, and in all matters he was
dictator, lawmaker, and judge, and from his decisions there was no
appeal. It never occurred to him that there ever need be. So Hester
Craigmile, reserved and intense, closed her lips on her own thoughts,
which it seemed to her to be useless to utter, and let them eat her
heart out in silence.

At the moment expected she heard the step on the floor of the
vestibule, and the door opened, but it was not her husband's step
alone that she heard. Surely it was Peter Junior's and his cousin's.
Were they coming to dinner? But no word had been sent. Hester stepped
out of the room and stood at the head of the stairs waiting. She did
not wish to go down and meet her son before the others, and if he did
not find her below, he would know where to look for her.

Peter Senior was an Elder in the Presbyte