Vaguely it had been understood in the Gordon household that Mr. Duxbury Parley was a widower with two children: a boy, some two years older than Thomas Jefferson, at school in New England, and a girl younger, name and place of sojourn unknown. The boy was coming South for the long vacation, and the affairs of Chiawassee Coal and Iron--already reaching out subterraneously toward the future receivership--would call the first vice-president North for the better portion of July. Would Mrs. Martha take pity on a motherless lad, whose health was none of the best, and open her home to Vincent? Mrs. Martha would and did; not ungrudgingly on the vice-president's account, but with many misgivings on Thomas Jefferson's. She was finding the surcharged industrial atmosphere of the new era inimical at every point to the development of the spiritual passion she had striven to arouse in her son; to paving the way for the realizing of that ideal which had first taken form when she had written "Reverend Thomas Jefferson Gordon" on the margin of the letter to her brother Silas. As it fell out, the worst happened that could happen, considering the apparent harmlessness of the exciting cause. Vincent Farley proved to be an anemic stripling, cold, reserved, with no surface indications of moral depravity, and with at least a veneer of good breeding. But in Thomas Jefferson's heart he planted the seed of discontent with his surroundings, with the homely old house on the pike, unchanged as yet by the rising tide of prosperity, and more than all, with the prospect of becoming a chosen vessel. It was of no use to hark back to the revival and the heart-quaking experiences of a year agone. Thomas Jefferson tried, but all that seemed to belong to another world and another life. What he craved now was to be like this envied and enviable son of good fortune, who wore his Sunday suit every day, carried a beautiful gold watch, and was coolly and complacently at ease, even with Major Dabney and a foreign-born and traveled Ardea. Later in the summer the envy died down and Thomas Jefferson developed a pronounced case of hero-worship, something to the disgust of the colder-hearted, older boy. It did not last very long, nor did it leave any permanent scars; but before Thomas Jefferson was fully convalescent the subtle flattery of his adulation warmed the subject of it into something like companionship, and there were bragging stories of boarding-school life and of the world at large to add fresh fuel to the fire of discontent. Though Thomas Jefferson did not know it, his deliverance on that side was nigh. It had been decided in the family council of two--with a preacher-uncle for a casting-vote third--that he was to be sent away to school, Chiawassee Coal and Iron promising handsomely to warrant the expense; and the decision hung only on the choice of courses to be pursued.