“Then I’ll tell you what he’s doing at this moment,” cried Horace, with egregious confidence, as he held his watch to the windows. “It’s after eleven; he’s in the act of struggling out of some theatre, where the atmosphere’s so good for asthma!” Lettice left the gibe unanswered. It was founded on recent fact which she had been the first to deplore when Tony made no secret of it in the holidays; indeed, she was by no means blind to his many and obvious failings; but they interested her more than the equally obvious virtues of her other brothers, whose unmeasured objurgations drove her to the opposite extreme in special pleading. She tried to believe that there was more in her younger brother than in any of them, and would often speak up for him as though she had succeeded. It may have been merely a woman’s weakness for the weak, but Lettice had taught herself to believe in Tony. And perhaps of all his people she was the only one who could have followed his vagaries of that night without thinking the worse of him. But she had no more to say to Horace about the matter, and would have gone indoors without another word if Mr. Upton had not come out hastily at that moment. He had been looking for her everywhere, he declared with some asperity. Her mother could not sleep, and wished to see her; otherwise it was time they were all in bed, and what there was to talk about till all hours was more than he could fathom. So he saw the pair before him through the lighted rooms, a heavy man with a flaming neck and a smouldering eye. Horace would be heavy, too, when his bowling days were over. The girl was on finer lines; but she looked like a woman at her worst; tired, exasperated, and clearly older than her brother, but of other clay. That young man smoked a last cigarette in his father’s library, and unhesitatingly admitted the subject of dissension and dissent upon the terrace. “I said he wasn’t doing much good there,” he added, “and I don’t think he is. Letty stood up for him, as she always does.” “Do you mean that he’s doing any harm?” asked Mr. Upton plainly. “Not for a moment. I never said there was any harm in Tony. I—I sometimes wish there was more!” “More manhood, I suppose you’d call it?” Mr. Upton spoke with a disconcerting grimness. “More go about him,” said Horace. He could not say as much to his father as he had to Letty. That was evident. But he was not the boy to bolt from his guns. “Yet you know how much he has to take all that out of him?” continued Mr. Upton, with severity. “I know,” said Horace hastily, “and of course that’s really why he’s doing no good; but I must say that doctor of his doesn’t seem to be doing him any either.” Mr. Upton got excitedly to his feet, and Horace made up his mind to the downright snub that he deserved. But by a lucky accident Horace had turned the wrath that had been gathering against himself into quite another quarter.