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.

[Pg 11]

"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.[Pg 12] 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?"

[Pg 12]

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.

"'As a man sows,' you say, and you deny him another seeding and it may be a better harvest. You shut the door;—and if you shut it, it may not swing open again! With me it was the turning of a long lane. Hugh perhaps has not turned—yet." A breath of that past life had swept anew over Harry, the old shuddering recoil again had rushed upon him. It gave his voice a curious energy as he ended: "And I have seen how far a man may go and yet—come back!"

There was a pause. The judge had an inspiration. He folded the parchment, and rose.

"Perhaps it would be as well," he said in a [Pg 13]matter-of-fact way, "if the signing be left open for the present. Last testaments, whatever their provisions, are more or less serious matters, and in your case,"—he 

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