y if I decide to leave home."

The Elder caught his breath inwardly, but said no more. He recognized
in the boy enough of himself to know that he had met in him a power of
resistance equal to his own. He also knew what Peter Junior did not
know, that his grandfather's removal to this country was an act of
rebellion against the wishes of his father. It was a matter of family
history he had thought best not to divulge.

CHAPTER VIII

MARY BALLARD'S DISCOVERY

Peter Junior's mind was quite made up to go his own way and leave home
to study abroad, but first he would try to convert his father to his
way of thinking. Then there was another thing to be done. Not to
marry, of course; that, under present conditions, would never do; but
to make sure of Betty, lest some one come and steal into her heart
before his return.

After his talk with his father in the bank he lay long into the night,
gazing at the shadowed tracery on his wall cast by the full harvest
moon shining through the maple branches outside his window. The leaves
had not all fallen, and in the light breeze they danced and quivered,
and the branches swayed, and the shadows also swayed and danced
delicately over the soft gray wall paper and the red-coated old
soldier standing stiffly in his gold frame. Often in his waking dreams
in after life he saw the moving shadows silently swaying and dancing
over gray and red and gold, and often he tried to call them out from
the past to banish things he would forget.

Long this night he lay planning and thinking. Should he speak to Betty
and tell her he loved her? Should he only teach her to think of him,
not with the frank liking of her girlhood, so well expressed to him
that very day, but with the warm feeling which would cause her cheeks
to redden when he spoke? Could he be sure of himself--to do this
discreetly, or would he overstep the mark? He would wait and see what
the next day would bring forth.

In the morning he discarded his crutch, as he had threatened, and
walked out to the studio, using only a stout old blackthorn stick he
had found one day when rummaging among a collection of odds and ends
in the attic. He thought the stick was his father's and wondered why
so interesting a walking stick--or staff; it could hardly be called a
cane, he thought, because it was so large and oddly shaped--should be
hidden away there. Had his father seen it he would have recognized it
instantly as one that had belong