It had all been so horrible too, and so undeserved--worse than anything he had ever dreamed of; infinitely worse than the night he had been driven from Moorlands. Never in all his life had he shown his father anything but obedience and respect; furthermore, he had loved and admired him; loved his dash and vigor; his superb physique for a man of his years--some fifty odd--loved too his sportsmanlike qualities--not a man in the county was his equal in the saddle, and not a man in his own or any other county could handle the ribbons so well. If his father had not agreed with him as to when and where he should teach a vulgarian manners, that had been a question about which gentlemen might differ, but to have treated him with contempt, to insult him in public, leaving him no chance to defend himself--force him, really, into a position which made it impossible for him to strike back--was altogether a different thing, and for that he would never, never forgive him. Then a strange thing happened in the boy's mind. It may have been the shifting of a grain of gray matter never called into use before; or it may have been due to some stranded red corpuscle which, dislodged by the pressure he had lately been called upon to endure, had rushed headlong through his veins scouring out everything in its way until it reached his thinking apparatus. Whatever the cause, certain it was that the change in the boy's view of life was as instantaneous as it was radical. And this was quite possible when his blood is considered. There had been, it is true, dominating tyrants way back in his ancestry, as well as spend-thrifts, drunkards, roysterers, and gamesters, but so far as the records showed there had never been a coward. That old fellow De Ruyter, whose portrait hung at Moorlands and who might have been his father, so great was the resemblance, had, so to speak, held a shovel in one hand and a sword in the other in the days when he helped drown out his own and his neighbors' estates to keep the haughty don from gobbling up his country. One had but to look into Harry's face to be convinced that he too would have followed in his footsteps had he lived in that ancestor's time. It was when the boy, smarting under his father's insult, was passing under the blossoms of a wide-spreading magnolia, trying to get a glimpse of Kate's face, if by any chance she should be at her window, that this grain of gray matter, or lively red corpuscle--or whatever it might have been--forced itself through. The breaking away was slow--little by little--as an underground tunnel seeks an opening--but the light increased with every thought-stroke, its blinding intensity becoming so fierce at last that he came to a halt, his eyes on the ground, his whole body tense, his mind in a whirl. Suddenly his brain acted.