One part of his task at least was done. There was no need to break gently to the boy the news of his father’s homecoming. But the bite in the announcement still remained. He would have given something to have seen Paul meet his father and to know the reaction upon the boy of Gaspard’s _menage_, to employ his wife’s designation. Meantime he rode slowly home to his wife, sorely distressed for the boy who had become to him as his own son. The day would doubtless bring its own revelations, and he was philosopher enough to resolve that he would await developments. Later events justified the wisdom of this resolve. The dinner hour brought Gaspard to the big white house in the proud convoy of his son, to be at first shyly, then warmly welcomed by Peg, an ardent admirer in the old days. During the dinner there was something pathetic in the eager, wistful anxiety of the father to appear quite at his ease and to carry off the situation with his old time aplomb, and equally pathetic in the boy’s apologetic pride in his father, whose whole manner somehow did not ring true. Gaspard was obviously excited and overstrained, eager to please, too eager indeed, and yet insolently defiant, ready to fight. He seemed to be continuously conscious of an air of disapproval, if not contempt, on the part of his hostess. For, do her best, Augusta could not get out of her mind’s eye the little cavalcade which had accompanied Gaspard to the bungalow. Hence her disapproving contempt. Why did he bring them back with him? This was the question which, with irritating insistence, kept inserting itself among Gaspard’s efforts at brilliant conversation. Not the existence of that doubtful appanage of his, but his stupid effrontery in daring to flaunt the whole thing in the face of his friends and forcing them all to cut him. Augusta had no patience with such stupidity; indeed, she could not conceive how a man of the world could be guilty of any such ridiculous proceeding. It was a crime, not so much against the ethical standards of the valley, but against good form and common sense. In spite of herself, however, she began to be conscious of Gaspard’s old time charm. A brilliant conversationalist when he cared, a man of quite unusual intellectual culture, an art critic with a sure touch and true feeling, as the dinner advanced and as the Colonel’s generous old port began to warm the courage of his guest, Gaspard’s apologetic and wistful air began to evaporate and to give place to one of confident and complaisant ease. He was talking of “art,” with a very large capital A, to which he had been led by an appreciative reference to two new Raeburns which had recently arrived from England. He knew the artist’s work and his school. Once launched, he was off on a very even keel and with a steady breeze, over somewhat troubled waters, stretching from the pre-Raphaelites to the Cubists. From that to student days in the _Quartier Latin_, thence to his struggles with the hanging