When he took his leave Dorothy followed him out to the veranda. There had been nothing more than a pleasant friendship between them thus far, but Brant had been watching eagerly for a chance to say or do something which might lessen the distance. Here was the coveted opportunity; and when she gave him her hand at parting, with a halting excuse for the gloom of the household, he made bold to hold it while he said: “Don’t speak of it unless you want to; but--just send me about my business if I am intruding--is there anything I can do to help you?” “Then you know?” She stopped in tearful embarrassment, and he was too generous to allow her to go on. “I know nothing, and seek to know nothing--that is, not anything more than you want to tell me. But you seem to be in trouble.” “I am; we all are. And there is no reason why you shouldn’t know; it will be in the papers in the morning, and then every one will know. Will didn’t come home last night, and--and father found him in jail this morning.” With all his comings and goings, and with all his good will to know him better, Brant yet knew the black sheep as little as might be, and that little by hearsay. The boy was seldom at home in the evening, and on the few occasions when his homestayings had coincided with Brant’s visits he had been sullen and reticent, showing forth the fitness of Antrim’s epithets. Scanty as were his opportunities for observation, however, Brant had seen that the mother idolized her son and found no fault in him; that Isabel tempered her sisterly affection with a generous measure of contempt; and that Dorothy loved her brother not blindly, but well. And it was with Dorothy’s point of view that Brant chiefly concerned himself. “Where is he now?” he inquired. “We don’t know; that is the sharp edge of it. He was in his room at noon, but when I went to take him his dinner he was gone.” “One more question, and you need not answer it if I ought not to know: What was the trouble last night?” “I am not sure, but I think that--that--” she stumbled over the wording of it and would have broken down, but Brant ventured a word of comfort and she went on: “They were playing cards, and the police took them all. Will has made mamma believe they were not gambling, but I am afraid that isn’t true.” She turned away from him to lean against a veranda pillar to cry softly with her face in her hands. Brant saw the path of duty very clearly; and he saw, too, that it might easily lead him straight to his own undoing. None the less, he set his feet therein like a man and a lover. “Don’t cry,” he said. “We must find some way to help him. Does Antrim know anything about this?” “No; and that is why Isabel went to the theatre with him to-night. They had planned to go, and she knew he would find out if they stayed at home. She would have had to tell him.”