“Bill!” His mother's tone was stern. “There you are!” he marvelled. “You must have wished it lots of times yourself. I know you have. Yet you always talk as if you loved him.” In Rose's eyes, the habitual look of patience and understanding deepened. How could Bill, as yet scarcely tried by life, comprehend the purging flames through which she had passed or realize time's power to reveal unsuspected truths. “When you've been married to a man nearly twenty-two years and have built up a place together, there's bound to be a bond between you,” she eluded. “He just lives for this farm. It's almost as dear to him as you are to me, son, and it's a wonderful heritage, Bill, a magnificent heritage. Just think! Two generations have labored to build it out of the dust. Your father's whole life is in it. Your father's and mine. And your grandmother's. If only you could ever come to care for it!” Bill fidgeted uneasily. “You mean you want me to go on with it?” he demanded. “You want me to come back to it, settle down to be a farmer--like father?” The tone in which he asked this question made Rose choose her words carefully. “What are your plans, son? What do you want to be--not just now, but finally?” “I can't see what difference it makes what a fellow is--except that in one business a man makes more than in another. And I can't see either that it does a person a bit of good to have money. I'm having more fun right now than father or you ever had--more fun than anybody I know. Mother,” and his face was solemn as if with a great discovery, “I've figured it out that it's silly to do as most people--just live to work. I'm going to work just enough to live comfortably. Not one scrap more, either. You can't think how I hate the very thought of it.” Rose sighed. Couldn't she, indeed! She understood only too well how deeply this rebellion was rooted. The hours when he had been dragged up from the far shores of a dreamful slumber to shiver forth in the chill darkness to milk and chore, still rankled. Those tangy frosty afternoons, when he had been forced to clean barns and plow while the other boys went rabbit and possum hunting or nutting, were afternoons whose loss he still mourned. Nothing had yet atoned for the evenings when he had been torn from his reading and sent sternly to bed because he must get up so early. Always work had stolen from him these treasures--dreams, recreation and knowledge. He had been obliged to fight the farm and his father for even a modicum of them--the things that made life worth living. And the irony of it--that eventually it would be this farm and Martin's driving methods which, if he became reconciled to his father, would make it possible for him to drink all the fullness of leisure.