As if the question had evoked them, alluring shapes began to rise out of the depths. Ambition, though he knew it not by name, was the first that beckoned. The craftsman's blood stirred to its reawakening: to know how, and to do things; to compel the iron and steel and the stubborn forces of nature. This would be worthwhile; but better still, he would learn to be a leader of men. The magic vista opened again, but this time it stretched away into the future, and he saw himself keeping step with the ever-advancing march of progress--nay, even setting the pace in his own corner of the vast field. His father was content to follow; he would learn the trick of it and lead. The Farleys were said to be rich and steadily growing richer--not out of Chiawassee Iron, to be sure, but in others of their multifarious out-reachings; very good,--he would be rich, too. What a Duxbury Farley could do, he would do; on a larger scale and with a stubborner patience. He-- It was a mere turning of the head that sent the air-castles tumbling and left him choking in the dust of their dissolution. Something, he fancied it was a noise or some slight movement, made him look quickly toward the bed; and at sight of the still, white face among the pillows, boyish love--God Himself has made no stronger passion--swept doubt, distrust, rebellion, worldly ambition, all, into the abyss of renunciation. He went softly, groping because the quick tears blinded him, to kneel at the bedside. She was his mother; for one thing she had lived and striven and prayed; living or dying she must not, she should not, be disappointed. And if his service must be of the lip and not of the heart, she should never suspect, never, never! And so it came about that he knelt in the graying dawn of the Christmas morning, with his soul in thick darkness, lifting the prayer that in some form has shaped itself in all the ages on lips of trembling: "O God, if there be a God, have mercy on my soul, if I have a soul!" XVI THE BUBBLE, REPUTATION It was not until late in the afternoon of Christmas Day that Ardea was able to slip away from her guests long enough to run over to apprise herself of the condition of things at the Gordon house. Tom opened the door for her, and he made her come to the fire before he would answer her questions. Even then he sat glowering at the cheerful blaze as if he had forgotten her presence; and she was womanly enough, or amiable enough, to let him take his own time. When he began, it was seemingly at a great distance from matters present and pressing. "Say, Ardea; do you believe in miracles?" he asked abruptly. It was a large question to be answered offhand, but she broke the back of it with a simple, "Yes." "How do you account for them? Did God make His laws so they could be taken apart and put together again when some little human ant loses its way on a grass stalk or drops its grain of sugar?"