er
the surface as they happened to come, and the angles and projections
thereof draped with cobwebs.

When Peter Junior was able to leave his home and get about a little on
his crutches, he loved to come there and rest and spend his idle
hours, and Bertrand found pleasure in his companionship. They read
together, and sang together, and laughed together, and no sound was
more pleasant to Mary Ballard's ears than this same happy laughter.
Peter had sorely missed the companionship of his cousin, for, at the
close of the war, no longer a boy and unwilling to be dependent and
drifting, Richard had sought out a place for himself in the work of
the world.

First he had gone to Scotland to visit his mother's aunts. There he
found the two dear old ladies, sweetly observant of him, willing to
tell him much of his mother, who had been scarcely younger than the
youngest of them, but discreetly reticent about his father. From this
he gathered that for some reason his father was under a cloud. Yet he
did not shrink from trying to learn from them all they knew about him,
and for what reason they spoke as if to even mention his name was an
indiscretion. It was really little they knew, only that he had gravely
displeased their nephew, Peter Craigmile, who had brought Richard up,
and who was his mother's twin brother.

"But why did Uncle Peter have to bring me up? You say he quarreled
with my father?"

"Weel, ye see, ye'r mither was dead." It was Aunt Ellen, the elder by
twenty years, who told him most about it, she who spoke with the
broadest Scotch.

"Was my father a bad man, that Uncle 'Elder' disliked him so?"

"Weel now, I'd no say that; he was far from that to be right fair to
them both--for ye see--ye'r mither would never have loved him if he'd
been that--but he--he was an Irishman, and ye'r Uncle Peter could
never thole an Irishman, and he--he--fair stole ye'r mither from us
a'--an--" she hesitated to continue, then blurted out the real horror.
"Your Uncle Peter kenned he had ance been in the theayter, a sort o'
an actor body an' he couldna thole that."

But little was to be gained with all his questioning, and what he
could learn seemed no more than that his father had done what any man
might be expected to do if some one stood between him and the girl he
loved; so Richard felt that there must be something unknown to any one
but his uncle that had turned them all against his father. Why had his
father never appeared to