But as the early twilight came on and he did not appear, she grew restless, and knowing that it was too late for the proposed drive, quickly determined to go to the Parkses’ for a little while and return with Brooke. Going to her lounging room to call the carriage by telephone, for she had an entirely separate wire from the private service at her husband’s desk, she found several letters lying upon the table. Exclaiming at the carelessness of the maids, of whom two were kept for service of meals, etc., in the apartment, she looked at the addresses, and the handwriting on the last put the thought of going out from her mind. Four were in the handwriting of private secretaries, and promised social invitations; the fifth, addressed in the shaded pin-point writing of the seminary of thirty years ago, was postmarked Gilead; while the sixth was in the rough and painfully unformed hand of Adam, “the Cub,” as his friends called him, her only living son, now at a military school some sixty miles away. It was impossible to deny that the Cub was behind-hand in his work, and that, instead of being within two years of college, according to his father’s schedule, he was little more than in sight of it; but her mother’s heart told her that the rigidity of his father’s methods was quite as much to blame as her son’s stupidity. Coming of ancestors whose training on both sides had been for and of the out-of-door life, the forcing system of surveillance under which he had lived, summer and winter alike, since his eleventh year, had developed only the evil in him. Vainly she had suggested, nay almost fought, to have him sent to a famous ranch school, where the sons of several of her friends had learned self-reliance and books at one and the same time. Adam Lawton would not hear of it, saying the dangers of the life and the distance were too great. In Brooke his measure of fatherly affection was complete and satisfied, and that she should never put her hand in an empty pocket his chief desire; but still all his hopes of the future of his race theoretically centred in this only son, as in an asset of both flesh and money, and every hair of his tawny head and freckle on his face was more precious than his own life-blood; yet he had the narrowness of the self-made man, the financier in particular, and he could see honour and success in one path only—that in which he himself had trodden. Adam Lawton senior, now halfway between sixty and seventy, though he did not allow it even to himself, often felt the lack of academic knowledge, and therefore Adam junior must undergo a certain polishing system perforce, even if the substance to be polished lost its identity and crumbled to chalk in the process. For only two things had Adam evinced any liking,—for out-of-door life and a horse, while his backwardness with his lessons had cut off these outlets by keeping him at school or under tutelage the entire season through.