who went out to the farm a couple of times with
Alan.

George Mortimer might be described as an angular young man. His face,
large-featured, square-jawed, and bold-topped by broad forehead,
suggested the solemnity Alan had found so trying. Of course a young man
of his make-up was sure to have notions, and Mortimer's mind was knotted
with them; there seemed no soft nor smooth places in his timber. That
was why he had reasoned with the butcher by energetically grasping his
windpipe the evening that worthy gentleman had expressed himself so
distastefully over Allis Porter's contribution to the Reverend Dolman's
concert. Perhaps a young man of more subtle grace would have received
some grateful recognition for this office, but the matter had been quite
closed out so far as Mortimer was concerned; Alan tried to refer to it
afterward, but had been curtly stopped.

George Mortimer's chief notion was that work was a great thing,
seemingly the chief end of man. Another notion almost equally
prominent--he had derived it from his mother--was, that all forms
of gambling were extremely bad business. First and foremost in this
interdiction stood horse racing. The touch of it that hung like a small
cloud over the Brookfield horizon had inspired Mrs. Mortimer, as it had
other good people of the surrounding country, with the restricted
idea that those who had to do with thoroughbred horses were simply
gamblers--betting people. Her home was in Emerson, a dozen miles from
Brookfield.

Quite paradoxically, if Allis Porter had not given "The Run of
Crusader"--most certainly a racing poem--in the little church, this
angular young man with stringent ideas about running horses probably
would have never visited Ringwood. Something of the wide sympathy that
emanated from her as she told of the gallant horse's death struck into
his strong nature, and there commenced to creep into his thoughts at
odd intervals a sort of gratuitous pity that she should be inextricably
mixed up with race horses. His original honesty of thought and the
narrowness of his tuition were apt to make him egotistically sure
that the things which appealed to him as being right were incapable of
variation.

At first he had liked Alan Porter, with no tremendous amount of
unbending; now, because of the interest Allis had excited in him, the
liking began to take on a supervisory form, and it was not without a
touch of irritation in his voice that Alan informed his sister t