is the shyest, being an anachronism in a world of progress. One bit of
news, however, floated in on the gossip at Little Zoar. It related that
Nan's mother was dead, and that the body had lain two days unburied
while Tike was drowning his sorrow in a sea of his own "pine-top."

In the new life, as in the old, summer followed quickly on the heels of
spring, and when the hepaticas and the violets were gone, and the laurel
and the rhododendron were decking the cliffs of Lebanon in their summer
robes of pink and white and magenta, another door was opened for Thomas
Jefferson.

Vaguely it had been understood in the Gordon household that Mr. Duxbury
Parley was a widower with two children: a boy, some two years older than
Thomas Jefferson, at school in New England, and a girl younger, name and
place of sojourn unknown. The boy was coming South for the long
vacation, and the affairs of Chiawassee Coal and Iron--already reaching
out subterraneously toward the future receivership--would call the first
vice-president North for the better portion of July. Would Mrs. Martha
take pity on a motherless lad, whose health was none of the best, and
open her home to Vincent?

Mrs. Martha would and did; not ungrudgingly on the vice-president's
account, but with many misgivings on Thomas Jefferson's. She was finding
the surcharged industrial atmosphere of the new era inimical at every
point to the development of the spiritual passion she had striven to
arouse in her son; to paving the way for the realizing of that ideal
which had first taken form when she had written "Reverend Thomas
Jefferson Gordon" on the margin of the letter to her brother Silas.

As it fell out, the worst happened that could happen, considering the
apparent harmlessness of the exciting cause. Vincent Farley proved to be
an anemic stripling, cold, reserved, with no surface indications of
moral depravity, and with at least a veneer of good breeding. But in
Thomas Jefferson's heart he planted the seed of discontent with his
surroundings, with the homely old house on the pike, unchanged as yet by
the rising tide of prosperity, and more than all, with the prospect of
becoming a chosen vessel.

It was of no use to hark back to the revival and the heart-quaking
experiences of a year agone. Thomas Jefferson tried, but all that seemed
to belong to another world and another life. What he craved now was to
be like this envied and enviable son of good fortune, who wore his
S