TEMPTING

Journalistic Worthington ran true to type in the Milly Neal affair. No
newspaper published more than a paragraph about the "sudden death."
Suicide was not even hinted at in print. But newspaperdom had its own
opinion, magnified and colored by the processes of gossip, over which
professional courtesy exercised no control. That the girl had killed
herself was generally understood: that there had been a shooting,
previous to her death, was also current. Eager report recalled and
exaggerated the fact that she had been seen with Hal Surtaine at a
dubious road-house some months previous. The popular "inside knowledge"
of the tragedy was that Milly had gone to the Surtaine mansion to force
Hal's hand, failing in which she had shot him, inflicting an
inconsiderable wound, and then killed herself; and that Dr. Surtaine had
thereupon turned his son out of the house. Hal's removal to the hotel
served to bear out this surmise, and the Doctor's strategic effort to
cover the situation by giving it out that his son's part of the mansion
was being remodeled--even going to the lengths of actually setting a
force of men to work there--failed to convince the gossips.

Between the two men, the situation was now most difficult. Quite
instinctively Hal had fallen in with his father's theory that the primal
necessity, after the tragedy, was to keep everything out of print. That
by so doing he wholly subverted his own hard-won policy did not, in the
stress of the crisis, occur to him. Later he realized it. Yet he could
see no other course of action as having been possible to him. The mere
plain facts of the case constituted an accusation against Dr. Surtaine,
unthinkable for a son to publish against his father. And Hal still
cozened himself into a belief in the quack's essential innocence,
persuading his own reason that there was a blind side to the man which
rendered it impossible for him to see through the legal into the ethical
phases of the question. By this method he was saving his loyalty and
affection. But so profound had been the shock that he could not, for a
time, endure the constant companionship of former days. Consequently the
frequent calls which Dr. Surtaine deemed it expedient to make for the
sake of appearances, at Hal's hotel, resulted in painful, rambling,
topic-shifting talks, devoid of any human touch other than the pitiful
and thwarted affection of two personalities at hopeless odds. "Least
said soonest mende