eyes, and for a
moment he almost hoped that they would.

CHAPTER XII

DAMON AND PYTHIAS

By an odd coincidence, the night which had seen Henry and Esther
confront their father, had seen, in another household in which the young
people counted another member of their secret society of youth, a
similar but even less seemly clash between the generations. Ned Hazell
would be a poet too, and a painter as well, and perhaps a romantic
actor; but his father's tastes for his son's future lay in none of these
directions, and Ned was for the present in cotton. Now the elder Mr.
Hazell was a man of violently convivial habits, and the _bonhomie_, with
which he was accustomed to enliven bar-parlours up till eleven of an
evening, was apt to suffer a certain ungenial transformation as he
reached his own front door. There the wit would fail upon his lips, the
twinkle die out of his glance, and an unaccountable ferocity towards the
household that was waiting up for him take their place. When possible,
he would fix upon some trivial reason to give an air of plausibility to
this curious change in him; but if that were not forthcoming, he would,
it appeared, fly into a violent rage for just that very reason.

However, on this particular night, Heaven had provided him with an
heroic occasion. His son, he discovered, was for once out later than his
father. In what haunt of vice, or low place of drinking, he was at the
moment ensnared, no one better than his father could imagine. The
opportunity was one not to be missed. The outraged parent at last
realised that he had borne with him long enough, borne long enough with
his folderols of art and nonsense; and so determined was he on the
instant that he would have no more of it, that, with a quite remarkable
energy, he had thereupon repaired to his son's room, opened the window,
and begun vigorously to throw his pretty editions, his dainty
water-colours, his drawers full of letters, his cast of the Venus of
Milo, out on to the lawn, upon which at the moment a heavy rain was
also falling.

In the very whirlwind of his righteous vandalism his son had returned,
and, being a muscular, hot-blooded lad, had taken his father by the
throat, called him a drunken beast, and hurled him to the floor, where
he pinned him down with a knee on his chest, and might conceivably have
made an end of him, but for the interference of mother and sisters, who
succeeded at last in getting the dazed and some