All was well.
But the boy's blood tingled, and he was filled with an unexplainable sense of excitement.

Some one needed him, and he wanted urgently to be needed.

He turned from the window and ran his eyes over the long, wide, low-ceilinged masculine room, every single thing in which spelled Father to him; then he went back to the chair the right to sit in which had been given to him by death, persuaded that over the unseen wires that stretch from heart to heart a signal had been sent, certain that he was to hold himself in readiness to do something for Joan.
He had written out the words, "We count it death to falter, not to die" on a long strip of card in big bold letters.

They faced him as he sat and read over and over again what he regarded as his father's message.
It was a call to service, an inspiration to activity, and it had already filled him with the determination to fall into step with the movement of the world, to put the money of which he was now the most reluctant owner to some use as soon as the necessary legal steps of proving his father's Will had been taken.

He had made up his mind to leave the countryside at the end of the week and meet his father's lawyers and take advice as to how he could hitch himself to some vigorous and operative pursuit.