"Yes, it was your mother's doing," said old Dumont. "Now we'll try MY way of educating a boy."
So Jack entered the service of his father's god-of-the-six-days, and immediately showed astonishing talent and twelve-to-fourteen-hour assiduity. He did not try to talk with Pauline. He went nowhere but to business; he avoided the young men.
"It's a bad idea to let your home town know too much about you," he reflected, and he resolved that his future gambols out of bounds should be in the security of distant and large cities—and they were. Seven months after he went to work he amazed and delighted his father by informing him that he had bought five hundred shares of stock in the mills—he had made the money, fifty-odd thousand dollars, by a speculation in wool. He was completely reestablished with his father and with all Saint X except Colonel Gardiner.
"That young Jack Dumont's a wonder," said everybody. "He'll make the biggest kind of a fortune or the biggest kind of a smash before he gets through."
He felt that he was fully entitled to the rights of the regenerate; he went to Colonel Gardiner's law office boldly to claim them.
At sight of him the colonel's face hardened into an expression as near to hate as its habit of kindliness would concede. "Well, sir!" said he, sharply, eying the young man over the tops of his glasses.
Dumont stiffened his strong, rather stocky figure and said, his face a study of youthful frankness: "You know what I've come for, sir. I want you to give me a trial."
"No!" Colonel Gardiner shut his lips firmly.
"Good morning, sir!" And he was writing again.
"You are very hard," said Dumont, bitterly.