He wouldn't tackle it again. The boy was
stronger than he was. He had to lie back and let things take their course
as best they might.

"Cheer up! Cheer up!" counseled the robins outside, but millionaire
Cressy heeded not their injunctions. The balloon of his hopes lay pricked
and flat in the dust.

He rose, dressed, breakfasted and discovered there was an eleven o'clock
train for Boston. He discovered also that he hadn't the slightest wish to
take it. He did not want to go to Boston. He did not want to go to Crest
House. And very particularly and definitely he did not want to see his
daughter Carlotta. Carlotta might ferret out his errand to Dunbury and be
bitterly angry at his interference with her affairs. Even if she were not
angry how could he meet her without telling her everything, including
things that were the boy's right to tell? It was safer to stay away from
Crest House entirely. That was it. He would telegraph Carlotta his gout
was worse, that he had gone to the country to take a cure. He would be
home Saturday.

Immensely heartened he dispatched the wire. By this time it was
ten-thirty and the dew on the grass was all dry, the morning glories shut
tight and the robins vanished. The church bells were ringing again
however and Harrison Cressy decided to go to church, the white Methodist
church on the common. He wouldn't meet any of the Hill people there. The
Holidays were Episcopal, the Lamberts Unitarian--a loose, heterodox kind
of creed that. He wished Phil were Methodist. It would have given him
something to go by. Then he grinned a bit sheepishly at his own expense
and shook his head. He had had the Methodist creed to go by himself and
much good had it done him. Maybe it did not make so much difference what
you believed. It was how you acted that mattered. Why that was
Unitarianism itself, wasn't it? Queer. Maybe there was something in it
after all.

Seated in the little church Harrison Cressy hardly listened to the
preacher's droning voice. He followed his own trend of thought instead,
recalling long-forgotten scriptural passages. "What shall it profit a man
though he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?" was one of the
recurring phrases. He applied it to Philip Lambert, applied it sadly to
himself and with a shake of his head to his daughter, Carlotta. He
remembered too the story of the rich young man. Had he made Carlotta as
the rich young man, cumbered her with so many worldly possessions