ed at her work-worn hands; but
those things which bound them indissolubly were never spoken of between
them. His infirmity was never mentioned save once when, a boy, and then
delicate, he came in from the knoll where he had been watching the
woodsmen felling trees. His face was terrible to her, but she went on
getting their dinner and did not speak.

"Grannie," he said at last, "what am I going to do?"

She paused over her fire, and turned her face to him, flushed with heat
and warm with mother love.

"Sonny," she said, "we will do the will of God."

"Did He do this to me?" the boy asked inflexibly.

She looked at the mountain beyond the lake, whence, she knew, her
strength came hourly.

"The world is His," she said. "He does everything. We can't find out
why. We must help Him. We must ask Him to help us do His will."

Then they sat down to dinner, and the boy, strengthening his own savage
will, forced himself to eat.

He did not think so much about the ways of God as shrewdly, when he grew
older, of toughening muscles and hardening flesh. Peter's talents,
Peter's triumphs, became a kind of possession with him. Osmond had
perhaps his first taste of happiness when Peter went abroad, and Osmond
knew who had sent him and who, if the market-garden throve, had sworn to
keep him there. The allowance he provided Peter thereafter gave him as
much pleasure in the making as it did the boy in the using of it. Peter
was like one running an easy race, not climbing the difficult steps that
lead to greatness. It looked, at times, as if it were the richness of
his gift that made his work seem play,--not Osmond's fostering. But now,
coming home to more triumphs, Peter seemed to have forgotten the goal.

He found Osmond one morning resting under the apple tree, his chosen
shade. Peter strode up to the spot moodily, angrily even, his
picturesque youth well set off by the ease of his clothes. Osmond
watched him coming and approved of him without condition, because he saw
in him so many kinds of mastery. Peter gave him a nod, and threw himself
and his hat on the grass, at wide interval. He quoted some Latin to the
effect that Osmond was enjoying the ease of his dignified state.

"I've been up and at it since light," said Osmond, smiling at him. "You
don't know when sun-up is."

Peter rolled over and studied the grass.

"Are you coming up to see Rose?" he asked presently.

Osmond could not tell him Rose had been to see him.