As he lay there he could see himself harshly forcing the bitter medicine upon his son, the cure for a disease for which he was himself responsible; he could see his son's look and could not deny its justice.
"I reckon he hates me," thought Hiram, pouring vitriol into his own wounds, "and I reckon he's got good cause to." But there was in the old miller a Covenanter fiber tough as ironwood.
The idea of yielding did not enter his head.

He accepted his sufferings as part of his punishment for past indulgence and weakness; he would endure, and go forward.

His wife understood him by a kind of intuition which, like most of our insight into the true natures of those close about us, was a gradual permeation from the one to the other rather than clear, deliberate reasoning.

But the next morning her sore and anxious mother's heart misread the gloom of his strong face into sternness toward her only son.
"When did you allow to put the boy to work, father ?" she finally said, and her tone unintentionally made Hiram feel more than ever as if he had sentenced "the boy" to hard labor in the degradation and disgrace of a chain gang.
As he waited some time for self-control before answering, she thought her inquiry had deepened his resentment.

"Not that I don't think you're right, maybe," she hastened to add, "though"-- this wistfully, in a feminine and maternal subtlety of laying the first lines for sapping and mining his position--"I often think about our life, all work and no play, and wonder if we oughtn't to give the children the chance we never had." "No good never came of idleness," said Hiram, uncompromisingly, "and to be busy about foolishness is still worse.