The dog on the rug rose, stretching, and came to thrust an eager insinuating muzzle into its master's lap. Rummy whined, the stubby tail wagged, but his master paid no heed, and with dejected ears, he slunk out into the sunshine. Harry was looking, with brows gathered to a frown, at the far-away porch. The look was full of a troubled question, a vague misgiving, an interrogative anxiety. He was thinking of a night when he had saved the son of that house from the calamity of disinheritance--to what end?
For since that moonlighted evening of the will-making Harry had learned that the long lane had had no true turning for Hugh. He had sifted him through and through. At college he had put him down for a weakling--unballasted, misdemeanant. Now he knew him for what he really was--a moral mollusk, a scamp in embryo, a decadent, realizing an ugly propensity to a deplorable _finale_. A consistent career of loose living had carried Hugh far since those college days when he had been dubbed "Satan's Shadow." While to Harry Sanderson the eccentric and agnostical had then been, as it were, the mask through which his temperament looked at life, to Hugh it had spelled shipwreck. Harry Sanderson had done broadly as he pleased. He had entertained whom he listed; had gone "slumming"; had once boxed to a finish, for a wager, a local pugilist whose acquaintance he affected, known as "Gentleman Jim." He had been both the hardest hitter and the hardest drinker in his class, yet withal its most brilliant student. Native character had enabled him to persist, as the exasperating function of success which dissipation declined to eliminate. But the same natural gravitation which in spite of all aberration had given Harry Sanderson classical honors, had brought Hugh Stires to the imminent brink of expulsion. And since that time, without the character which belonged to Harry as a possession, Hugh had continued to drift aimlessly on down the broad lax way of profligacy.
The conditions he found upon his return, however, had opened Hugh's eyes to the perilous strait in which he stood. He was a materialist, and the taste he had had of deprivation had sickened him. In the first revulsion, when the contrast between recent famine and present plenty was strong upon him, he had been at anxious pains to make himself secure with his father--and with Jessica Holme. Harry's mental sight--keen as the hunter's sight on the rifle-barrel--was sharpened by his knowledge of the old Hugh, an intuitive knowledge gained in a significant formative period. He saw more clearly than the townfolk who, in a general way, had known Hugh Stires all their lives. Week by week Harry had seen him regain lost ground in his father's esteem; day by day he had seen him making studious appeal to all that was romantic in Jessica, climbing to the favor of each on the ladder of the other's regard. Hugh was naturally a _poseur_, with a keen sense of effect. He could be brilliant at will, could play a little on piano, banjo and violin, could sing a little, and had himself well in hand. And feeling the unconscious cord of romance vibrate to his touch, he had played upon it with no unskilful fingers.