ere are compensations. You'll see what some of them are when your
boys begin to grow up."

IV

Across Oliver's young joy fell the shadow of fear. If, as his heart
told him, there was nothing to be afraid of, why were his elders thus
cautious and terrified? He felt himself affected by their alarms all
the more potently because his understanding of them was vague. He
groped his way in fog. How much ought he to be influenced by {34} Mrs.
Lannithorne's passionate protests and his father's stern warnings? He
realized all at once that the admonitory attitude of age to youth is
rooted deep in immortal necessity. Like most lads, he had never
thought of it before save as an unpleasant parental habit. But fear
changes the point of view, and Oliver had begun to be afraid.

Then again, before him loomed the prospect of his interview with Peter
Lannithorne. This was a very concrete unpleasantness. Hang it all!
Ruth was worth any amount of trouble, but still it was a tough thing
to have to go down to the state capital and seek one's future
father-in-law in his present boarding-place! One oughtn't to have to
plough through that particular kind of difficulty on such an errand.
Dimly he felt that the path to the Most Beautiful should be rose-lined
and soft to {35} the feet of the approaching bridegroom. But,
apparently, that was n't the way such paths were laid out. He resented
this bitterly, but he set his jaws and proceeded to make his
arrangements.

It was not difficult to compass the necessary interview. He knew a man
who knew the warden intimately. It was quickly arranged that he was to
see Peter Lannithorne in the prison library, quite by himself.

Oliver dragged himself to that conference by the sheer strength of his
developing will. Every fibre of his being seemed to protest and hold
back. Consequently he was not in the happiest imaginable temper for
important conversation.

The prison library was a long, narrow room, with bookcases to the
ceiling on one side and windows to the ceiling on the other. There
were red {36} geraniums on brackets up the sides of the windows, and a
canary's cage on a hook gave the place a false air of domesticity,
contradicted by the barred sash. Beneath, there was a window-seat, and
here Oliver Pickersgill awaited Lannithorne's coming.

Ollie did not know what he expected the man to be like, but his
irritated nerves were prepared to resent and dislike him, what