“Hugh Wynne and I fell apart this last winter of ‘72 and ‘73. It was my fault.” This I do not understand. “Came then that hideous night in April, and all the rest; and Hugh I saw the day after, and begged him to forgive me because I had so easily deserted him. I took him later a kind message from Mr. James Wilson; for our small city knew it all. Friends looked at him as one disgraced, except Friend Rupert Forest, who, to my amusement, seemed to enjoy to hear the whole story, saying, ‘Alas! alas!’ and yet, as I saw, far more pleased than distressed. It brought to my mind the battle he had set us to fight out when we were boys. For a week or two Hugh was dispirited, but after that, when the colonel had called, and his cousin, Arthur Wynne, began to be more and more with him, he took heart, and faced our little world, and would let no one, except myself, say a word to him of the time of his downfall; this I think I never did, save perhaps once, and that long after. “There was no need to preach. Converted devils make the best saints. I never was as good as Hugh, because I lacked courage to be wicked. Hugh was no saint, but he drank no more for a long while; and was ever after moderate. As to cards and dice, it was much the same.” What Jack has here written is all nonsense. He was a better man than I, and never was nor could have been a bad one. IX I have said that one event had to be recorded before I completed the story of that episode of which I was weary of hearing. My father--and it was against all his habits in regard to most matters--reminded me almost daily of my misdeeds. He hoped I did not drink any more, and he would even look at the square flasks on the shelf to see, as I suspected, if they had been used. To be prayed for was worst of all, and this he did more than once. It was all of it unwise, and but for my mother I should have been even more unhappy. I can see now that my father was this while in distress, feeling that he must do something, and not knowing what to do. In his business life there had always been a way opened, as Friends say. He did not see that what I needed was what it was not in his nature to give, and thus it came about that we drew apart, and perhaps neither then nor at any later time were, or could ever have been, in the kindlier relation which makes the best of friendships that of the grown-up son with the elderly father. At last, after a month or more, when it was far on in June, he ceased to trouble me, and to walk up and down, opening and shutting his hands, as he recounted my sins. He had reached an unfortunate decision, of which I was soon to feel the results. In the mean time my cousin, Mr. Arthur Wynne, had come into very close intimacy with all our family circle. As he had much to do with my later life, it is well to return a little, and to detail here what followed after the night of my mother’s visit to the coffee-house.