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Four were in the handwriting of private secretaries, and promised social invitations; the fifth, addressed in the shaded pin-point writing of the seminary of thirty years ago, was postmarked Gilead; while the sixth was in the rough and painfully unformed hand of Adam, “the Cub,” as his friends called him, her only living son, now at a military school some sixty miles away.

It was impossible to deny that the Cub was behind-hand in his work, and that, instead of being within two years of college, according to his father’s schedule, he was little more than in sight of it; but her mother’s heart told her that the rigidity of his father’s methods was quite as much to blame as her son’s stupidity. Coming of ancestors whose training on both sides had been for and of the out-of-door life, the forcing system of surveillance under which he had lived, summer and winter alike, since his eleventh year, had developed only the evil in him.

Vainly she had suggested, nay almost fought, to have him sent to a famous ranch school, where the sons of several of her friends had learned self-reliance and books at one and the same time. Adam Lawton would not hear of it, saying the dangers of the life and the distance were too great.