Susan went into the kitchen. If that young man up there wanted to say anything and ease his mind, she swore she would give him a chance; maybe he would be more peaceable if she did. She sat down by the kitchen fire quite unmindful of the fact she was spoiling the love-making Bill was clumsily striving at, while he smelled the chicken steaming and the hot rolls baking for the early supper, which Montague had ordered soon as he had caught sight of his guests. When she heard Mrs. Randall's slow footstep up the stair and hurried up the other way, she found her charm had worked; her patient was peaceable as a lamb. On Frances' face was a look it warmed the heart of the old woman to see,--the flushed, faint flickerings of the beginnings of a great happiness. XXIII Lawson's hard study was bringing its own reward. There were high opinions forming of him on quadrangle and in hall. But he gave no heed to them. He was holding to a grim determination, and the interest he felt growing stronger and stronger in his work was an incentive he had not expected. It was not often his mind went back to idle memories, or forward to visionary hopes; he lived as he swore he would do when he came back to the University, and he kept to his purpose with the self-will he had used in every other pursuit. As the days lengthened and the grass greened on the quadrangle and the maple blossoms drifted on the thick sward, the contest with himself grew harder. He had followed the bent of his humor always, and, with spring-tide abroad, the old desire for wandering came upon him. He had tramped, driven, roamed, lived out-of-doors; had known a camp life in the Rockies, and the long lazy days by the ocean's swell at Santa Barbara, and the lazy loungings in foreign cities. Now when soft winds brought through his opened window a breath of fresh fields and opening leaf-buds, and the languorous odor of violets and hyacinths, and the hum of bees and the songs of mocking-birds, his room, with its worn floor and ashy hearth and dusty hangings, seemed stifling. The outside world called him. He pushed his books from him, and his thoughts ran idly into a channel forbidden. He got to his feet and picked up his cap. He would have a long tramp up the sides of Mount Jefferson. As he opened the door the postman, going his afternoon rounds, called to him, "Mail for you," and held up a bunch of cards and papers and a letter. Lawson glanced at them, stepped back into his room and closed the door. The letter was from his father, in his own handwriting. He wrote seldom. There was little he would say to his son through his secretary; and what he said in his own style was ill-spelt, and his son was college-bred.