But now, sitting in enforced inaction and in the chill and calm which diffuses from the tomb, he was using the unused, the reflective, half of his mind.
Even as Henrietta was talking, he began to see what seemed to him the hidden meaning in the mysterious "Put your house in order" that would give him no rest.

But he was not the man to make an important decision in haste, was the last man in the world to inflict discomfort, much less pain, upon anyone, unless the command to do it came unmistakably in the one voice he dared not disobey.

Day after day he brooded; night after night he fought to escape.

But, slowly, inexorably, his iron inheritance from Covenanter on one side and Puritan on the other asserted itself.
Heartsick, and all but crying out in anguish, he advanced toward the stern task which he could no longer deny or doubt that the Most High God had set for him.
He sent for Dory Hargrave's father.
Mark Hargrave was president of the Tecumseh Agricultural and Classical University, to give it its full legal entitlements.

It consisted in a faculty of six, including Dr.Hargrave, and in two meager and modest, almost mean "halls," and two hundred acres of land.