hed out and found his hand and wrung
it hard.

"I'll tell her, sir, that I feel about her father as she does! And
that he approves of our venture. And I'll tell myself, always, what
you've just told me. Why, it _must_ be true! You need n't be afraid
I'll forget--when the time comes for remembering."

Finding his way out of the prison yard a few minutes later, Oliver
looked, unseeing, at the high walls that soared against the blue
spring sky. He could not realize them, there was such a sense of
light, air, space, in his spirit.

Apparently, he was just where he had been an hour before, with all his
battles still to fight, but really he knew they were already won, for
his weapon had been forged and put in his hand. He left his boyhood
behind him as he {50} passed that stern threshold, for the last hour
had made a man of him, and a prisoner had given him the master-key
that opens every door.

{51}

THE LONG INHERITANCE

{52}

{53}
THE LONG INHERITANCE

I

My niece, Desire Withacre, wished to divorce her husband, Dr. Arnold
Ackroyd,--the young Dr. Arnold, you understand,--to the end that she
might marry a more interesting man.

Other men than I have noticed that in these latter days we really do
not behave any better than other people when it comes to certain
serious issues of life, notably the marital. "We" means to me people
of an heredity and a training like my own,--Americans of the old
stock, with a normal Christian upbringing, who presumably inherit from
their forebears a reasonable susceptibility to high ideals of living.
I grew {54} up with the impression that such a birth and rearing were
a kind of moral insurance against the grosser human blunders and
errors. Without vanity, I certainly did

"Thank the goodness and the grace
That on my birth had smiled."

It puzzled me for a long while, the light-hearted, careless way in
which some of the younger Withacres, Greenings, Raynies, Fordhams, and
so on (I name them out of many, because they are all kin to me) kicked
over the traces of their family responsibilities. I could understand
it in others but not in them.

It was little Desire Withacre who finally illuminated the problem for
me. I am about to tell what I know of Desire's fling. If it seems to
be a story with an undue amount of moral, I must {55} refer the
responsibility of that to Providence. The tale is of its making,