door not quite closed, added to which she
talked at the top of her voice on all subjects. "What real gentleman, I
should like to know, is going to marry the daughter of a City attorney?
As I told him years ago, he ought to have retired and gone into the
House."

"The very thing your poor father used to talk of doing whenever things
were going a bit queer in the retail coal and potato business," grunted
old Gadley.

Mrs. Stillwood called him a "low beast" in her most aristocratic tones,
and swept out of the room.

Not that old Stillwood himself ever expressed fondness for the law.

"I am not at all sure, Kelver," I remember his saying to me on one
occasion, "that you have done wisely in choosing the law. It makes
one regard humanity morally as the medical profession regards it
physically:--as universally unsound. You suspect everybody of being a
rogue. When people are behaving themselves, we lawyers hear nothing of
them. All we hear of is roguery, trickery and hypocrisy. It
deteriorates the character, Kelver. We live in a perpetual atmosphere of
transgression. I sometimes fancy it may be infectious."

"It does not seem to have infected you, sir," I replied; for, as I think
I have already mentioned, the firm of Stillwood, Waterhead and Royal
was held in legal circles as the synonym for rectitude of dealing quite
old-fashioned.

"I hope not, Kelver, I hope not," the old gentleman replied; "and yet,
do you know, I sometimes suspect myself--wonder if I may not perhaps
be a scamp without realising it. A rogue, you know, Kelver, can always
explain himself into an honest man to his own satisfaction. A scamp is
never a scamp to himself."

His words for the moment alarmed me, for, acting on old Gadley's
advice, I had persuaded my mother to put all her small capital into Mr.
Stillwood's hands for re-investment, a transaction that had resulted in
substantial increase of our small income. But, looking into his smiling
eyes, my momentary fear vanished.

Laughing, he laid his hand upon my shoulder. "One person always be
suspicious of, Kelver--yourself. Nobody can do you so much harm as
yourself."

Of Washburn we saw more and more. "Hal" we both called him now, for
removing with his gentle, masterful hands my mother's shyness from about
her, he had established himself almost as one of the family, my mother
regarding him as she might some absurdly bearded boy entrusted to her
care without his knowing it, I looking up to him