“Show me how to help it—show me how to want to help it!” spluttered the banker. “I don't want to keep my temper! I don't want to hold my tongue! I wish the law of the land would let me take him, big as he is, and thrash him on the streets before the very folks that call him, as some have, an improvement on his stingy old daddy. Once I thought I had him. Once I thought I'd caught him dickering with bank funds, and I had started to have him put in limbo when he showed me I was wrong. That's the kind of man I am! I put honesty above everything else, and I won't hide dishonor, even in my own blood.”
“Well, I'm off,” Wynn Dearing said. “I see I only keep you going on the very topic I have warned you against. Good-night.”
As the young doctor was approaching the gate he saw a figure in gray, enveloped, as to head and shoulders, in an old cashmere shawl, emerge from a clump of plum-trees near the fence. It was Fred Walton's stepmother, a tall, thin woman of more than sixty years of age, and even dim as the starlight was he noticed the hardness of her features as she clutched the shawl under her chin and eagerly peered out from its folds.
“Oh, we have had a day of it, Dr. Dearing!” she said, familiarly, and with a dry, forced laugh. “When you came in at the gate just now I made the same mistake Simon did—I thought it was Fred, and hung back at the side of the house to hear the row. I reckon the boy has decided he's had enough tongue-lashing for one day, and don't intend to sleep here to-night. I don't blame his father one bit,” she ran on, volubly, “and I have the first one to meet who really does. Fred certainly keeps himself in the public eye. There is hardly a day that some fresh report don't crop out as to his scrapes. And the match-makers! Great goodness! They have enough to keep ten towns the size of this busy. They are eager to see now which Fred will tie to for life: your sister, with all her money and fine old name, or that strip of a girl who paints and teaches for a bare living. Some say she is daft about him, and that if your uncle kicks him out he will settle on her. That's what folks say, you know. The truth is, I live sort of out of the way, and don't hear all that is going the rounds.”
“That is a matter I am not posted on, Mrs. Walton,” Dearing said, as he opened the gate and politely raised his hat in parting. “I must hurry. I only wanted to see Fred a minute.”
As he neared the central square of the town the rays of light from the church where he had that morning attended service streamed across the green, and he approached the little edifice, ascended the steps to the vestibule, and cautiously peered in at the worshippers, wondering if by any chance Fred Walton might be there as Dora Barry's escort. But no one of the numerous backs turned toward him resembled Fred's, and his glance moved on to the pulpit. The choir was in full view, facing the door, and beside the keyboard of the organ sat the girl who played it. Was it the shadows from the gas above her, or was the tense expression in her eyes and the droop to the sweet young mouth due to some trouble even greater than any he had yet surmised? He shuddered as he turned away and pursued his walk toward the square. He would look for Walton at the bank, and try to divest his mind of the disagreeable duty he had to perform; but Dora's face continued to haunt him. The mute appeal of her white, shapely hands patiently folded in her lap, the suggestion of utter despair in her whole bearing, clung to him and wrung his manly heart. She had been his playmate when she was a tiny girl and he an awkward boy in his teens. He had loved her gentle old father, with his long hair and high, poetic brow, and had believed for years that Dora had inherited his genius. The artist had gone back to Paris to study, intending to send for his wife and child when fortune smiled, as he was sure it would. But he had died there, and was buried by his fellow-students of the Latin Quarter. They had written the fact to the wife and orphan, but that was all. It was his child who was in trouble, and Dearing's heart ached with a dull, insistent pain.
There was a light in the bank; he saw its gleam through the old-fashioned panes of glass in front, but it went out just as he drew near the door, which he saw was slightly ajar. As he stood wondering, he heard some one coming. It was Fred Walton; he was smoking, and the flare of his cigar lighted up his dark, handsome face for a bare instant. He was tall, well-built, and strong of physique.
“Hello! Is that you, Fred?” Dealing called out. There was a pause. Walton seemed to shrink back into the darkness for a moment; then he said:
“Yes. Who is it?”
“It is I, Fred—Wynn Dearing.”