Where is it?" said he.

"Oh, I suppose it's in my bureau drawer," said the colonel, with
impatience. "Left hand. I kept it; I don't know why."

"Yes," said Jeffrey. "Of course you kept your pipe."

He ran softly upstairs, opening and shutting doors with an admirable
quiet, and put his hand on the old briarwood. From Anne's room he heard
a low crooning. She was awake then, but with mind at ease or she
wouldn't sing like that. He could imagine how Lydia had dropped off to
sleep, like a burden of sweet fragrances cast on the bosom of the night,
an unfinished prayer babbled on her lips. But to think of Lydia now was
to look trouble in the face, and he returned to his father not so
thoroughly in the spirit of a specious gaiety. It did him good, though,
to see the colonel's fingers close on the old pipe, with a motion of the
thumb, indicating a resumed habit, caressing a smooth, warm boss. The
colonel soberly but luxuriously lighted up, and they sat and puffed a
while in silence. Jeffrey drew up a chair for his father's feet and
another for his own.

"What's your idea," he said,' at length, "of Weedon Moore?"

The colonel took his pipe out and replaced it.

"Rather a dirty fellow, wasn't he?"

"Yes. That is, in college."

"What d' he do?"

The colonel had never been told at the time. He knew Moore was an
outcast from the gang.

"Everything," said Jeffrey briefly. "And told of it," he added.

The colonel nodded. Jeffrey put Moore aside for later consideration, and
made up his mind pretty generously to talk things over. The habit of his
later years had been all for silence, and the remembered confidences of
the time before had involved Esther. Of that sweet sorcery he would not
think. As he stood now, the immediate result of his disaster had been to
callous surfaces accessible to human intercourse and at the same time
cause him, in the sensitive inner case of him, to thank the ruling
powers that he need never again, seeing how ravaging it is, give himself
away. But now because his father had got to have new wine poured into
him, he was giving himself away, just as, on passionate impulse, he had
given himself away to Lydia. He put his question desperately, knowing
how inexorably it committed him.

"Do you suppose there's anything in this town for me to do?"

The colonel produced at once the possibility he had been privately
cherishing.

"Alston Choate--"

"I know," said Jeffrey. "I sha'n't go to Choate. You kn