Mr. Winthrop turned and looked in his son's face with feverishly bright eyes that showed their lack of sleep. Then he seated himself in the arm-chair before the desk, drawing Charles's chair close, that he might speak in lowered tones.
"Something terrible has occurred, Charles. Your mother does not know yet. The blow has fallen so suddenly that I find myself unable to believe it is true. I am dazed. I can scarcely think. Charles, your only brother, my son——" The old man paused, and with a sudden contraction of his heart Charles noticed that there were tears coursing down his father's wrinkled cheeks. The voice quavered and went on:
"Our first-born has been guilty of a great wrong. It is best to face the truth, my boy. Harrington has committed a crime. I don't see how it can be thought otherwise by any honest person. I am trying to look at the facts, but even as I speak the words I cannot realize that they are true of one of our family."
Charles waited, his eyes fixed upon the old man's face, and a great indignation growing within him toward the brother who could dare bring dishonor upon such a father!
Mr. Winthrop bowed his head upon his hand for a moment, as though he could not bear to reveal the whole truth. Then he roused himself as one who has need of haste.
"Charles, your brother already has a wife and two little children, yet he was proposing to wed another woman. He has dared to court and win an innocent young girl, and to hoodwink her honorable father. And the worst of it is that he meant to carry it out and marry her! Oh the shame of it! We are disgraced, Charles! We are all disgraced!" With a low groan the father buried his face in his hands and bowed himself upon the desk.
The heart of the young man grew hot. A great desire for vengeance was surging over him. He arose excitedly from his chair.
"Harrington has done this, father!"
The words burst from his lips more like a judgment pronounced than like a question or a statement of fact. It was as if the acknowledgment of his brother's sin were a kind of climax in his thought of that brother, whom he had been all these years attempting to idealize, as a boy so often idealizes an elder brother. The words bore with them, too, the recognition of all the pain and disappointment and perplexity of many things throughout the years. Charles's finer nature suddenly revolted in disgust from all that he saw his brother to be.
He stood splendidly indignant, above the bowed head of his father, a picture of fine, strong manhood, ready to avenge the rights of insulted womanhood. There before him arose a vision obscuring the walls of the book-lined library—the vision of a girl, fresh, fair, lovely, with eyes alight, cheeks aglow, floating hair, and fluttering white drapery, garlanded in pink and white blossoms that filled the air with the breath of a spring morning. It blazed upon him with clearness and beauty, and veiled by no hindering sense of wrong. With a great heart throb of joy, he recognized that she no longer belonged to his brother.