Harry acknowledged the brusque kindliness of the tone with a little motion of the hand. As he spoke he had been feeling his way through a maze of contradictory impulses. For a moment he had been back in that old irresponsible time; the Hugh he had known then had sprung to his mind's eye--an imitative idler, with a certain grace and brilliancy of manner that made him hail-fellow-well-met, but withal shallow, foppish and incorrigible, a cheap and shabby imitator of the outward manner, not the inner graces, of good-fellowship. Yet Hugh had been one of his own "fast set"; they had called him "Satan's shadow," a tribute to the actual resemblance as well as to the palpable imitation he affected. Harry shivered a little. The situation seemed, in antic irony, to be reversing itself. It was as if not alone Hugh, but he, Harry Sanderson, in the person of that past of his, was now brought to bar for judgment in that room. For the instant he forgot how utterly characterless Hugh had shown himself of old, how devoid of all desire for rehabilitation his present reputation in the town argued him. At that moment it seemed as if in saving Hugh from this condemnation, he was pleading for himself as he had been--for the further chance which he, but for circumstances, perhaps, had needed, too. His mind, working swiftly, told him that no appeal to mere sentiment would suffice--he must touch another note. As he paused, his eyes wandered to an oil portrait on the wall, and suddenly he saw his way.
"You," he said, "have lived a life of just and balanced action. It is bred in the bone. You hate all loose conduct, and rightly. You hate it most in Hugh for the simple reason that he is your son. The very relation makes it more impossible to countenance. He should be like you--of temperate and prudent habit. But did you and he start on equal terms? Your grandfather was a Standish; your ancestry was undiluted Puritan. Did Hugh have all your fund of resistance?"
The old man's gaze for the first time left Harry's face. It lifted for an instant to the portrait at which Harry had glanced--a picture of Hugh's dark gipsy-like mother, painted in the month of her marriage, and the year of her death--and in that instant the stern lines about the mouth relaxed a little. Harry had laid his finger on the deepest cord of feeling in the old man's gruff nature. The glow that had smoldered in the cavernous eyes faded and a troubled cloud came to belie their former wrath.