Colonel Preston Chester and his son Langdon were at breakfast two days after this. The dining-room of the old mansion was a long, narrow chamber on the first floor, connected with the brick kitchen outside by a wooden passage, roofed, latticed at both sides, and vine-grown. The dining-room had several wide windows which opened on a level with the floor of the side veranda. Strong coffee, hot biscuits, and birds delicately browned were brought in by a turbaned black woman, who had once been a slave in the family, and then she discreetly retired. The old gentleman, white-haired, pink and clear of complexion, and wearing a flowing mustache and an imperial, which he nervously clutched and twisted in his soft fingers, was not in a good humor. "Here I am ready to go to Savannah, as I promised, to pay a visit and bring your mother back," he fumed, "and now find that you have taxed my credit at the bank so heavily with your blasted idleness and poker debts that they actually gave me a lecture about my financial condition. But I’ve certainly headed you off, sir. I left positive orders that no check of yours is to be honored during my absence." "You did that, father? Why—" "Of course I did it. I can’t put up with your extravagance and damnable habits, and I don’t intend to." "But, father, I’ve heard you say you cost your parents on an average of four thousand dollars a year before you got married, and—" "Don’t begin that twaddle over again," roared the Colonel in his coffee-cup. "What my father did for me in those easy times has nothing to do with our condition in the present day. Besides, it was the custom of the times to live high, while now it’s coming to be a disgrace to be idle or to have luxuries. We’ve got to work like the rest at something or other. Here’s that Luke King back from the West with enough money to install his whole gang of white trash in one of the best places in the entire river valley, and is conducting a paper in Atlanta that everybody is talking about. Why, blast it all, I heard Governor Crawford say at the Capital City Club the other day that if he—mind you, the governor of the State—if he could get King’s influence he would be re-elected sure. Think of that, when I put a fortune into your education. You are doing nothing for your name, while he’s climbing like that on the poor chances he had." "Oh, he had education, such as he needed," Langdon replied, with a retaliatory glance at his father. "Ann Boyd sent him to school, you know." The old man’s eyes wavered; he drank from his cup silently, and then carefully wiped his mustache on his napkin. It was not the first time Langdon had dared to pronounce the woman’s name in his presence, and it looked as if the Colonel dreaded further allusions.