"Yes; but think of it," he urged impatiently. "I hate to brag, mother; but do you take in all he meant: that he saw no reason, if I kept on, that I should not make a record as a chemist?" While he spoke, his gray eyes were fixed on her imploringly. Under some conditions and in some connections, she would have been swift to read in them the text of his unspoken prayer; but not now. Her ancestral tendencies forbade: those and the doubts which centred in her son's other heritage, less orthodox and far, far less under the domination of the spiritual. Now and then the boy looked like his father, astoundingly like, and disturbingly. This was one of the times. Across his young enthusiasm, her answer fell like a wet linen sheet. "But are you going to keep on?" He tried to regain his former accent. "That is what I want to decide, right now," he said as buoyantly as he was able. "Of course, it isn't just what I started out to do; but he seemed to feel it was my chance, and you and I, both of us, have been used to taking any chance that came. What do you think I'd better do?" For a moment, she worked fussily at the twisted wire leg of the tile that held the coffee pot. Her eyes were still upon the wire, when at last she answered. "You must do as you think right, my son." "But what do you really think, yourself?" he urged her. This time, she lifted her eyes until they rested full upon his own. "It isn't exactly what we have planned it all for, Scott. Still, it may be that this will be the next best thing, after all." "Then you would be disappointed, if I took the chance?" She felt the edge of the coming renunciation in his voice and in his half-unconscious change of tense, and she dropped her eyes again, for fear they should betray the gladness that she felt, and so should hurt him. "Do you need to decide just now?" she asked evasively. "Between now and next summer." "Why not wait till then?" He crossed her question with another. "What's the use of waiting?" "You may get more light on it, if you wait," she said gravely.