“I won’t waste breath telling you all I’d hoped for you,” began Conover, “or how I tried to give you all I missed in my own boyhood. You haven’t the brains to understand—or care. What I’ve got to say is all about money. And I never found you too stupid to listen to that. You’ve cut your throat. Nothing can mend that. We’ll talk about the future at another time. It’s the present we’ve got to ’tend to now. You’re going to be of some use to me at last. The only use you ever will be to anyone. Your allowance, for a few months, is going on just the same as before. But you’ve got to earn it. And you’re going to earn it by staying right here in Granite, and working like a dog for me in this campaign. If you stir out of this town, or if your—that woman comes here, or if you don’t use your pull in my behalf with the sap-heads you travel with at the Pompton Club—if you don’t do all this, I say, till further orders—then, for now and all time, you’ll earn your own way. For you’ll not get another nickel out of me. I guess you know me well enough to understand I’ll go by what I say. Take your choice. You’ve got an earning ability of about $4 a week. You’ve got an allowance of $48,000 a year. Now, till after election, which’ll it be?” Father and son faced each other in silence for a full minute. Then the latter’s eyes fell. “I’ll stay!” he muttered. “I thought so. Now chase! I’m busy.” Gerald slouched to the door. On the threshold he turned and shook his fist in impotent fury at the broad back turned on him. “I’ll stay!” he repeated, his voice scaling an octave and breaking in a hysterical sob, “I’ll stay! But, before God, I’ll find a way to pay you off for this before the campaign is over.” Caleb did not turn at the threat nor at the loud-slamming door. He was scribbling a telegram to his New York lawyer. “_Gerald in scrape with chorus girl, Enid Montmorency_,” he wrote. “_Find her and buy her off. Go as high as $100,000._” “Father Healy says, ‘The sins of the fathers shall be visited on the children,’” he quoted half-aloud as he finished; “but when they are visited in the shape of blithering idiocy, it seems ’most like a breach of contract.” The Railroader was not fated to enjoy even the scant privilege of solitude. He had hardly seated himself at his desk when the sacred door was once more assailed by inquisitive knuckles. “The Boys haven’t wasted much time,” he thought as he growled permission to enter. The tall, exquisitely-groomed figure of his new son-in-law, the Prince d’Antri, blocked the threshold. With him was Blanche. “Do we intrude?” asked d’Antri, blandly, as he ushered his wife through the doorway and placed a chair for her. Caleb watched him without reply. The multifarious branches of social usage always affected him with contemptuous hopelessness. He saw no sense in them; but neither, as he confessed disgustedly to himself, could he, even if he chose, possibly acquire them.