She could not stand it! She could not stay here! She must go back to her hills, where there was peace for her.
She heard the sister going down to unlock the street door so that Father Tenney could walk in when it was time and go up to the chapel for the sisters’ early mass.
That was her chance! The sisters would be in chapel. The girls would be still in their rooms.
She dressed hastily and threw her books into a bag. She would take only these and her money. She had enough to get home on. The rest did not matter.
When she heard the priest’s step pass in the hall, she slipped out and down the dim, broad stairs.
The great, heavy door of the convent stood like the gate of the world. It swung slowly, deliberately, on its well-oiled, silent hinges.
She stood in the portal a moment, drinking hungrily the fresh, free air of the morning that had come down from her hills. Then she fled away into the dawn.
The sun was just showing over Lansing mountain as Jeffrey Whiting came out of his mother’s house dragging a hair trunk by the handle. His uncle, Cassius Bascom, drove up from the barn with the team and sled. Jeffrey threw his trunk upon the sled and bent to lash it down safe. It was twenty-five miles of half broken road and snowdrifts to Lowville and the railroad.
Jeffrey Whiting was doing what the typical American farm boy has been doing for the last hundred years and what he will probably continue to do as long as we Americans are what we are. He is not always a dreamer, your farm boy, when he starts down from his hills or his cross-roads farm to see the big world and conquer it. More often than you would think, he knows that he is not going to conquer it at all. And he is not, on the other hand, merely running away from the drudgery of the farm. He knows that he will probably have to work harder than he would ever have worked on the farm. But he knows that he has things to sell. And he is going down into the markets of men. He has a good head and a strong body. He has a power of work in him. He has grit and energy.