able to conceal his
discontent. Mr. Wheeler was afraid he was one of those visionary
fellows who make unnecessary difficulties for themselves and
other people. Mrs. Wheeler thought the trouble with her son was
that he had not yet found his Saviour. Bayliss was convinced that
his brother was a moral rebel, that behind his reticence and his
guarded manner he concealed the most dangerous opinions. The
neighbours liked Claude, but they laughed at him, and said it was
a good thing his father was well fixed. Claude was aware that his
energy, instead of accomplishing something, was spent in
resisting unalterable conditions, and in unavailing efforts to
subdue his own nature. When he thought he had at last got himself
in hand, a moment would undo the work of days; in a flash he
would be transformed from a wooden post into a living boy. He
would spring to his feet, turn over quickly in bed, or stop short
in his walk, because the old belief flashed up in him with an
intense kind of hope, an intense kind of pain,--the conviction
that there was something splendid about life, if he could but
find it.

IX

The weather, after the big storm, behaved capriciously. There was
a partial thaw which threatened to flood everything,--then a hard
freeze. The whole country glittered with an icy crust, and people
went about on a platform of frozen snow, quite above the level of
ordinary life. Claude got out Mr. Wheeler's old double sleigh
from the mass of heterogeneous objects that had for years lain on
top of it, and brought the rusty sleighbells up to the house for
Mahailey to scour with brick dust. Now that they had automobiles,
most of the farmers had let their old sleighs go to pieces. But
the Wheelers always kept everything.

Claude told his mother he meant to take Enid Royce for a
sleigh-ride. Enid was the daughter of Jason Royce, the grain
merchant, one of the early settlers, who for many years had run
the only grist mill in Frankfort county. She and Claude were old
playmates; he made a formal call at the millhouse, as it was
called, every summer during his vacation, and often dropped in to
see Mr. Royce at his town office.

Immediately after supper, Claude put the two wiry little blacks,
Pompey and Satan, to the sleigh. The moon had been up since long
before the sun went down, had been hanging pale in the sky most
of the afternoon, and now it flooded the snow-terraced land with
silver. It was one of those sparkling winter nights