hat he
had acquired a second father, and with juvenile malignity attributed the
incumbrance to her seductive influence.

With all these cross purposes at work it can be readily understood that
Mortimer's visits to Ringwood were not exactly rose-leaved. In truth,
the actors were all too conventionally honest, too unsocialized, to
subvert their underlying motives. Allis, with her fine intuition, would
have unearthed Mortimer's disapprobation of racing--though he awkwardly
strove to hide it--even if Alan had not enlarged upon this point. This
knowledge constrained the girl, even drove her into rebellion. She took
his misunderstanding as a fault, almost as a weakness, and shocked
the young man with carefully prepared racing expressions; reveled with
strange abandon in talks of gallops, and trials, and work-outs, and
breathers; threw ironmouthed horses, pullers, skates, and divers other
equine wonders at his head until he revolted in sullen irritation. In
fact they misunderstood each other finely; in truth their different
natures were more in harmony two miles apart, the distance that lay
between the bank and Ringwood.

By comparison Crane's visits to Ringwood were utopianly complacent.
Strangely enough, Mrs. Porter, opposed to racing as she was, came
quite readily under the glamor of his artistic unobtrusiveness. He had
complete mastery over the science of waiting. His admission to the good
lady of a passing interest in horses was an apology; there seemed such
an utter absence of the betting spirit that the recreation it afforded
him condoned the offense.

There was this difference between the two men, the old and the young:
Crane knew exactly why he went there, while Mortimer had asked himself
more than once, coming back from Ringwood feeling that he had been
misunderstood--perhaps even laughed at--why he had gone there at all.
He had no definite plan, even desire; he was impelled to it out of some
unrecognized force. It was because of these conditions that the one
potter turned his images so perfectly, and the other formed only poor,
distorted, often broken, dishes of inferior clay.

It stood in the reason of things, however, that Mortimer, in spite of
his uncompromising attitude toward racing, should be touched by its
tentacles if he visited at Ringwood.

His first baptism came with much precipitancy on the occasion of his
fourth visit to the Porters. He had driven out with Alan to spend his
Saturday afternoon at R