But the murmuring voices went on near him, and little bursts of laughter rang out, or two figures wandered about the garden, and his thoughts always came back to one point--a point where the sun seemed to shine on things and surround them with a dazzling radiance. "Yes, it's all very well for _me_," he concluded more than once. "It's well enough for _me_ to sit down and spend the rest of my life looking at the mountains and watching summer change into winter; but they are only beginning it all--just beginning." So one night he left his chair and went out and walked between them in the moonlight, a hand resting on a shoulder of each. "See," he said, "I want you two to help me to make up my mind." "About going away?" asked Rupert, looking round at him quickly. "Yes. Do you know we may have a pretty hard time? We've no money. We should have to live scant enough, and, unless we had luck, we might come back here worse off than we left." "But we should have tried, and we should have been on the other side of the mountains," said Sheba. "So we should," said Tom, reflectively. "And there's a good deal in seeing the other side of the mountains when people are young." Sheba put her hand on his and looked at him with a glowing face. "Uncle Tom," she said, "oh, let us go!" "Uncle Tom," said Rupert, "I _must_ go!" The line showed itself between his black brows again, though it was not a frown. He put his hand in his pocket and held it out, open, with a solitary twenty-dollar bill lying in it. "That's all I've got," he said, "and that's borrowed. If the claim is worth nothing, I must earn enough to pay it back. All right. We'll all three go," said Tom. The next day he began to develop the plans he had been allowing to form vaguely as a background to his thoughts. They were not easy to carry out in the existing condition of general poverty. But at Lucasville, some forty miles distant, he was able to raise a mortgage on his land. "If the worst comes to the worst," he said to Sheba, "after we have seen the other side of the mountains, do you think you could stand it to come back and live with me in the rooms behind the store?" Sheba sat down upon his knee and put her arms round his neck, as she had done when she was ten years old. "I could live with you anywhere," she said. "The only thing I couldn't stand would be to have to live away from you." Tom laughed and kissed her. He laughed that he might smother a sigh. Rupert was standing near and looking at her with the eyes that were so like Delia Vanuxem's. CHAPTER XXIV For an imaginative or an untravelled person to approach the city of Washington at sunrise on a radiant morning, is a thing far from unlikely to be remembered, since a white and majestic dome, rising about a white structure set high and supported by stately colonnades, the whole gleaming fair against a background of blue sky, forms a picture which does not easily melt away.