into the house, spoke suddenly in his father's own drawl:

"I don't want anyone to give me my keep. I'll take care of the furnace and do the work round the house you pay a man to do, and if that isn't enough to pay for keeping me, I'll work for you in your office Saturdays."

Mr. Dennis looked at the tall boy keenly, then said whimsically, "Well, I thought you'd been smitten dumb."

"He's very still, Jim is, except when he's fearfully worked up. All the Mannings are that way," said his mother.

Mr. Dennis nodded. "The house takes lots of care. Your mother will get a maid to help her and I'll let the man go who has been doing janitor service for me. With this arrangement, I'll make your mother's salary $65 a month."

And so the decision was made.

It was the last week in September when Jim and his mother left Exham. The day before they left the old town, Jim tramped doggedly up the street toward the old Manning mansion. He had not been there since his father's death.

When he reached the dooryard he stopped, pulled off his cap and stood looking at the doorway that had welcomed so many Mannings and sped so many more. The boy stood, erect and slender, the wind ruffling his thick dark hair across his dreamer's forehead, his energetic jaw set firmly. Now and again tears blinded his gray eyes, but he blinked them back resolutely.

Jim must have stood before the door of his old home for half an hour, a silent, lonely young figure at whom the quarry men glanced curiously. When the whistle blew five Jim made an heroic effort and turned and looked at the derrick, again spliced into place. He shuddered but forced himself to look.

It was after sunset when Jim finally turned away. It was many years before he came to this place again. Yet Exham had made its indelible imprint on the boy. The convictions that had molded his first fourteen years were to mold his whole life. Somehow he felt that his father had been a futile sacrifice to the thing that was destroying New England and that old New England spirit which he had been taught to revere. What the thing was he did not know. And yet, with his boyish lips trembling, he promised the old mansion to make good for his father and for Exham—poor old Exham, with its lost ideals!

CHAPTER III

THE BROWNSTONE FRONT