The more law he read, the more interested he became. In January, he asked Dick Hoover if it were possible to study law in leisure hours. Hoover told him it was not only possible, it was easy. The end of January saw Wint putting in his spare time on calfskin-bound volumes of which each page was one-third reading matter and two-thirds footnotes. The first day he picked up a book of cases was marked with a red letter on his mental calendar. He found these cases as interesting as fiction. He began to read law systematically. Dick Hoover’s father was interested, helped him. The elder Hoover told Wint’s father one day: “Chase, your boy is going to make a lawyer before he’s through.” The senior Chase looked at Hoover, half minded to resent the fact that his son had been mentioned in his presence. But--the old wound was healing. Men no longer took occasion to remind him of last fall’s election with a jeer in their eyes. His conditional alliance with Kite had languished, because Wint had made no move to make the town dry. Chase hated Amos Caretall as ardently as ever; but he could not hate his son. That is not the way with fathers. He loved Wint; he had been, for some time, secretly proud of him. He said to Hoover: “He’s smart enough, if he sticks to it.” “He’s sticking,” Hoover told Wint’s father. Winthrop Chase, Senior, nodded indifferently, hiding the light in his eyes. “He never stuck to anything before,” he said, and turned away. He thought of telling Wint’s mother, that night, but did not do so. When he spoke of Wint to her, it precipitated one of her endless remarks. They wearied him. But he had to tell some one, so he told Hetty Morfee, when he went to the kitchen for a drink of water. Hetty was washing dishes at the time, and she stopped with a plate in one hand and a dish-rag in the other, and listened, and said with a cheerful wistfulness in her voice: “Wint’s smart, sir. You’ll be proud of him.” Chase was proud of him, but he would not admit it to himself, much less to Hetty. “He’s smart enough,” he told her. “But he’s ... He’s....” He turned abruptly and went out of the kitchen without saying what Wint was, and Hetty looked after him with understanding in her smile. Then her face became still and somber again. There was growing in Hetty’s eyes a certain unhappy light. A desperate fashion of unhappiness, which no one was sufficiently interested to notice. She was not so cheerful as she used to be. And there was a helplessness about her. Word of Wint’s new industry spread slowly through Hardiston. It was Dick Hoover himself who told Joan of it. Dick was a Mason, and he took Joan to a Masonic dance one night. She spoke of Wint. “I have heard that he is studying law,” she said. “Is it true?” So Dick told her. “True as Gospel,” he said. “And he’s darned quick to pick it up, too. The principles.... Of course, it will take time. But I’d just as soon have him try a case for me now, as some of these....”