inner qualities of which the outer beauty was
only the fitting symbol.

So, in the face of this catastrophe, where a less love must have been
destroyed utterly, Dick remained loyal. His passionate regard did not
falter for a moment. It never even occurred to him that he might cast
her off, might yield to his father's prayers, and abandon her. On the
contrary, his only purpose was to gain her for himself, to cherish and
guard her against every ill, to protect with his love from every attack
of shame or injury. He would not believe that the girl did not care
for him. Whatever had been her first purpose of using him only as an
instrument through which to strike against his father, whatever might
be her present plan of eliminating him from her life in the future, he
still was sure that she had grown to know a real and lasting affection
for himself. He remembered startled glances from the violet eyes, caught
unawares, and the music of her voice in rare instants, and these told
him that love for him stirred, even though it might as yet be but
faintly, in her heart.

Out of that fact, he drew an immediate comfort in this period of his
misery. Nevertheless, his anguish was a racking one. He grew older
visibly in the night and the day. There crept suddenly lines of new
feeling into his face, and, too, lines of new strength. The boy died in
that time; the man was born, came forth in the full of his steadfastness
and his courage, and his love.

The father suffered with the son. He was a proud man, intensely
gratified over the commanding position to which he had achieved in the
commercial world, proud of his business integrity, of his standing in
the community as a leader, proud of his social position, proud most of
all of the son whom he so loved. Now, this hideous disaster threatened
his pride at every turn--worse, it threatened the one person in the
world whom he really loved. Most fathers would have stormed at the boy
when pleading failed, would have given commands with harshness, would
have menaced the recalcitrant with disinheritance. Edward Gilder did
none of these things, though his heart was sorely wounded. He loved
his son too much to contemplate making more evil for the lad by any
estrangement between them. Yet he felt that the matter could not safely
be left in the hands of Dick himself. He realized that his son loved
the woman--nor could he wonder much at that. His keen eyes had
perceived Mary Turner's graces of fo