When Adelaide, sent by her mother, came to sit with him, he said: "Draw
the blinds, child, and leave me alone. I want to rest." She obeyed him.
At intervals of half an hour she opened the door softly, looked in at
him, thought he was asleep, and went softly away. But he had never been
further from sleep in his life. Henrietta Hastings's harum-scarum
gossiping and philosophizing happened to be just what his troubled mind
needed to precipitate its clouds into a solid mass that could be clearly
seen and carefully examined. Heretofore he had accepted the conventional
explanations of all the ultimate problems, had regarded philosophers as
time wasters, own brothers to the debaters who whittled on dry-goods
boxes at the sidewalk's edge in summer and about the stoves in the rear
of stores in winter, settling all affairs save their own. But now,
sitting in enforced inaction and in the chill and calm which diffuses
from the tomb, he was using the unused, the reflective, half of his mind.

Even as Henrietta was talking, he began to see what seemed to him the
hidden meaning in the mysterious "Put your house in order" that would
give him no rest. But he was not the man to make an important decision in
haste, was the last man in the world to inflict discomfort, much less
pain, upon anyone, unless the command to do it came unmistakably in the
one voice he dared not disobey. Day after day he brooded; night after
night he fought to escape. But, slowly, inexorably, his iron inheritance
from Covenanter on one side and Puritan on the other asserted itself.
Heartsick, and all but crying out in anguish, he advanced toward the
stern task which he could no longer deny or doubt that the Most High God
had set for him.

He sent for Dory Hargrave's father.

Mark Hargrave was president of the Tecumseh Agricultural and Classical