living. Though he was less demonstrative than Lucy, who
had outgrown the plainness and the reticence of her childhood and was
developing into a coquettish, shallow-minded girl, with what Miss
Priscilla called "a glib tongue," Virginia learned gradually, in the
secret way mothers learn things, that his love for her was, after his
ambition, the strongest force in his character. Between him and his
father there had existed ever since his babyhood a curious, silent, yet
ineradicable hostility. Whether the fault was Oliver's or Harry's,
whether the father resented the energy and the initiative of his son, or
the son resented the indifference and the self-absorption of his father,
Virginia had never discovered. For years she fought against admitting
the discord between them. Then, at last, on the occasion of a quarrel,
when it was no longer possible to dissemble, she followed Oliver into
his study, which had once been the "back parlour," and pleaded with him
to show a little patience, a little sympathy with his son. "He's a boy
any father would be proud of----" she finished, almost in tears.

"I know he is," he answered irritably, "but the truth is he rubs me the
wrong way. I suppose the trouble is that you have spoiled him."

"But he isn't spoiled. Everybody says----"

"Oh, everybody!" he murmured disdainfully, with a shrug of his fine
shoulders.

He looked back at her with the sombre fire of anger still in his eyes,
and she saw, without trying to see, without even knowing that she did
see, all the changes that years had wrought in his appearance.
Physically, he was a finer animal than he had been when she married him,
for time, which had sapped her youth and faded her too delicate bloom,
had but added a deeper colour to the warm brown of his skin, a steadier
glow to his eyes, a more silvery gloss to his hair. At forty, he was a
handsomer man than he had been at twenty-five, yet, in spite of this,
some virtue had gone out of him--here, too, as in life, "something was
missing." The generous impulses, the high heart for adventure, the
enthusiasm of youth, and youth's white rage for perfection--where were
these? It was as if a rough hand had passed over him, coarsening here,
blotting out there, accentuating elsewhere. The slow, insidious devil of
compromise had done its work. Once he had made one of the small band of
fighters who fight not for advantage, but for the truth; now he stood in
that middle place with the safe maj