ne, too, I
should say."

"Did I?" grinned Tom. He was willing to bear the blame until Kincaid
should have ample time to disappear.

"Yes; and with all due allowance for your provocation, it was a good bit
beneath you, my boy."

The younger man laughed grimly. "Wait till you know the full size of the
provocation, Doctor. I'm not half as bad as I might be. Another man
would have left him to burn--here and hereafter."

The doctor said no more. It was not his province to make or meddle in
the quarrel between the Gordons and the Farleys. And Tom also was
silent, having many things to render him reflective.

When he was put down at Woodlawn it was after one o'clock. Yet he sat
for an hour or more on the veranda, smoking many pipes and trying as he
could to prefigure the future in the light of the night's happenings.

What an insufferable animal Farley was, to be sure!--with the love of a
woman like Ardea Dabney failing to keep him on the hither side of common
decency! Would Ardea break with him, now that she knew the truth? Tom
shook his head. Not she; she would stand by him all the more stoutly, if
not for love, then for pride's sake. That was the fine thing in her
loyalty.

That thought led to another. When they were married, there would have to
be a beginning in a new field. Chiawassee was gone, and the Farley
fortune with it; and the new field would be a bald necessity. Tom
decided that not even Ardea's pride and fortitude could face the looks
askance of the Mountain View Avenue folk.

He measured the country colonists justly. They might have forgiven the
moral lapse, though that was not the side they had turned toward him.
Yet he fancied that when the business failure should be super-added, the
Farley sins would become too multitudinous for the broadest mantle of
charity to cover.

"Which brings on more talk," he mused, pulling thoughtfully at the pipe.
"They can't start in the new diggings without money. Anyway, Vincent's
no moneymaker; and if the look on a man's face counts for anything, old
Colonel Duxbury has made his last flight from the promoting perch. O
Lord!"--rising with a cavernous yawn and a mighty stretching of his arms
overhead,--"I reckon it's up to me to go on doing all the things I don't
want to do; that I didn't in the least mean to do. Somebody ought to
write a book and call it _Saints Inveterate_. It would have simplified
things a whole lot if I could have left him to be cremated after all.