Indignant, Peter certainly was. There had never been an actual contract about the Beckmann brand; but the boy, accustomed to his college code, perceived something in the transaction dishonourable to the other side, weak on his own. Unreasonably as it seemed at the time—reasonably enough as it shows in the light of history—he thus early conceived an instinctive distrust, not only of Beckmanns, but of German business people in general. . . . However, a year in the City effectively replaced the college code by the legal. At the end of eighteen months—the “fight” resolving itself into a mere question of strong competition; each side more or less holding its own, with a slight sentimental balance in favour of those outside “the Ring”—Peter had settled down to the complacent routine of office life: ten till five, with an hour off for lunch and two Saturdays out of three absolutely workless. Sport—he was a safe shot, except at snipe for which he lacked the temperament; a good rider; and a really fine hand with the trout-fly—completed his existence. Dissipation, after one or two, experiments, he avoided—not from scruples, but because it bored him. Then, just after his twenty-first birthday, the “old man,” never very strong, caught pneumonia and died within the week. § 5 The death of his father was a vivid grief to Peter. For his mother, he had never experienced more than a lukewarm affection; Arthur had always been her favourite, and Peter—even as a child—had been conscious of the preference. But the “governor,” the “old boy!”—that seemed somehow or other different. They had worked together, talked together, driven home together, drank their port of an evening at the big mahogany table in the Lowndes Square dining-room, had their little rows, made them up again. . . . “Sentimental ass!” the boy said to himself, as he sat alone in the library that first night. But there were real tears in his eyes; tears that only work could dry. And of work, in the days that followed, there was enough. As co-executor, with Simpson, for his father’s estate, even Peter found himself sufficiently occupied. The business, the Crown lease of the Lowndes Square house, sundry outside investments—all required valuation, tabulation, preparation for probate. Death duties, auditor’s fees, lawyer’s fees—each had to be scrutinized, queried, and ultimately overpaid. Arthur—who, at seventeen, was already wearied of school—demanded an advance of trust-monies; got it; departed for Australia. In the end Peter recognized himself absolute possessor of some £30,000 (practically all in the business); and trustee for the £10,000 in stocks and shares which became his brother’s when he, too, reached twenty-one. “You _will_ be an ass,” said Francis Gordon, newly returned from two years of aimless wandering on the Continent, “if you go on slaving away in that office of yours.”