opinion. Moreover, such was
the respect and reverence in which she was held, and so great was the
sympathy felt for her situation, that she was seldom referred to in
connection with Harry or the affair except with a sigh, followed by
a "Too bad, isn't it?--enough to break your heart," and such like
expressions.

What the Honorable Prim thought of it all was apparent the next day at
the club when he sputtered out with:

"Here's a nice mess for a man of my position to find himself in! Do you
know that I am now pointed out as the prospective father-in-law of a
young jackanapes who goes about with a glass of grog in one hand and a
pistol in the other. I am not accustomed to having my name bandied about
and I won't have it--I live a life of great simplicity, minding my own
business, and I want everybody else to mind theirs. The whole affair
is most contemptible and ridiculous and smacks of the tin-armor age.
Willits should have been led quietly out of the room and put to bed
and young Rutter should have been reprimanded publicly by his father.
Disgraceful on a night like that when my daughter's name was on
everybody's lips."

After which outburst he had shut himself up in his house, where, so he
told one of his intimates, he intended to remain until he left for the
Red Sulphur Springs, which he would do several weeks earlier than was
his custom--a piece of news which not only confirmed Tom Tilghman's
gossip, but lifted several eyebrows in astonishment and set one or two
loose tongues to wagging.

Out at Moorlands, the point of view varied as the aftermath of the
tragedy developed, the colonel alone pursuing his daily life without
comment, although deep down in his heart a very maelstrom was boiling
and seething.

Mrs. Rutter, as fate would have it, on hearing that Kate was too ill
to go back to town, had gone the next morning to her bedside, where she
learned for the first time not only of the duel--which greatly shocked
her, leaving her at first perfectly limp and helpless--but of Harry's
expulsion from his father's house--(Alec owned the private wire)--a
piece of news which at first terrified and then keyed her up as tight as
an overstrung violin. Like many another Southern woman, she might shrink
from a cut on a child's finger and only regain her mental poise by
a liberal application of smelling salts, but once touch that boy of
hers--the child she had nourished and lived for--and all the rage of the
she-wolf figh