So sped the winter and the spring succeeding Thomas Jefferson’s thirteenth birthday, and for the first time in his life he saw the opening buds of the ironwood and the tender, fresh greens of the herald poplars, and smelled the sweet, keen fragrance of awakening nature, without being moved thereby.

Ardea he saw only now and then, as old Scipio drove her back and forth between the manor-house and the railway station, morning and evening.  He had heard that she was going to school in the city, and as yet there were no stirrings of adolescence in him to make him wish to know more.

As for Nan Bryerson, he saw her not at all.  For one thing, he climbed no more to the spring-sheltering altar rock among the cedars; and for another, among all the wild creatures of the mountain, your moonshiner is the shyest, being an anachronism in a world of progress.  One bit of news, however, floated in on the gossip at Little Zoar.  It related that Nan’s mother was dead, and that the body had lain two days unburied while Tike was drowning his sorrow in a sea of his own “pine-top.”

In the new life, as in the old, summer followed quickly on the heels of spring, and when the hepaticas and the violets were gone, and the laurel and the rhododendron were decking the cliffs of Lebanon in their summer robes of pink and white and magenta, another door was opened for Thomas Jefferson.

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.