Mark tried to take Gurdy’s absence with a fine philosophy. His broker and his lawyer assured him that Saint Andrew’s was the best school in the country. But the red, Georgian buildings spread on the New England meadow and the impersonal stateliness of the lean Headmaster seemed a cold nest for Gurdy. He missed the boy with a dry and aching pain that wasn’t curable by work on five new plays, Margot’s plump warmth on his knee or contrived, brief intoxication. All his usual enchantments failed. He wore out the phonograph plates of the Danse Macabre and the Peer Gynt “Sunrise.” He worried wretchedly and the disasters of October and November hardly balanced his interior trouble. Two, the more expensive two of the five Carlson and Walling productions failed. Carlson cheerfully indicated the shrinkage of applicants for jobs, hopeful playwrights and performers in the office above the 45th Street Theatre. Mark regretted twenty thousand dollars spent for shares in the Terriss Pictograph Company. Yet young Terriss was a keen fellow and Carlson thought something might come of motion pictures after a while. His friends sighed about Mark that the “show business was a gamble” and on visits to the farm Mark tried to be gay. A Military Academy had been built in Fayettesville on a stony field owned by Eddie Bernamer, the only heritage from Bernamer’s Norwegian father. Gurdy’s brothers were transferred to this polished school and Mark was soothed, in thinking that he’d made his own people grandees. He wished that he could ape the composure of the Bernamers and said so on a visit near Christmas time. “But, great Cæsar,” Bernamer blinked, kicking balled snow from a boot-heel, “this Saint Andrew’s is a good school ain’t it, even if it is up by Boston? The buildin’s are fire proof, ain’t they? Gurdy can’t git out at night and raise Ned? Then what’s got into you?” “Oh, but--my God, Eddie!... I miss him.” “You’re a fool,” said his brother-in-law, staring at Mark, “You’re doin’ the right thing by the boy. You always do the right thing--like you done it by us. Sadie and me’ve got seven kids and I love ’em all.... They got to grow up. Stop bein’ a fool.... You don’t look well. Thin’s a rail. Business bad?” “We lost about forty-five thousand in two months.” “That countin’ in the thousand you gave Sadie for her birthday?” “No--Lord, no!” Bernamer looked about the increased, wide farm and the tin roofed garage where Mark’s blue motor stood pompous beside the cheap family machine. He drawled, “Well, you’ve sunk about twenty-five thousand right here, bud. You let up on us. Save your money and set up that theatre of your own you want so. And I’m makin’ some money on the side.” “How?” The farmer grinned.