The son of Colonel Roger Craighill was inevitably a conspicuous person in his native city and his dissipated habits had long been the subject of despairing comment by his fellow-citizens, and the text of occasional lightly veiled sermons in press and pulpit. Dick Wingfield had once remarked that is was too bad that there were only ten commandments, as this small number painfully limited Wayne Craighill’s possible infractions. It was Wingfield who named Wayne Craighill the Blotter, in appreciation of Wayne’s amazing capacity for drink; and it was he who said that Wayne’s sins were merely an expression of the law of compensation and were thrown into the scale to offset Colonel Craighill’s nobility and virtue. Whatever truth may lie in this, it is indisputable that the elder Craighill’s rectitude tended to heighten the colour of his son’s iniquities. The Blotter had been drunk again. This is what would be said all over the Greater City. At the clubs it would be remarked that he had also had a fight with two policemen, and that he had been put in pickle at the Country Club and then smuggled to his office to await the arrival of Colonel Craighill, who had been to Cleveland to address something or other. The nobler his father’s errands abroad, the wickeder were the Blotter’s diversions in his absences. The last time that Roger Craighill had attended the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church Wayne had amused himself by violating all the city ordinances that interposed the slightest barriers to the enjoyment of life as he understood it. But the Blotter, it is only just to say, was still capable of shame. His physical and moral reaction to-day were acute; and he shrank from facing the world again. More than all, the thought of meeting his father face to face sent the hot blood surging to his head, intensifying its dull ache. His sister Fanny would be likely to show her sympathy and confidence by promptly giving a tea or a dinner to which he would be specially bidden, to demonstrate to the world that in spite of his derelictions his family still stood by him. The remembrance of past offenses, and of the definite routine that his restorations followed, only increased his misery. The usual interview with his father, with whose mild, martyr-like forbearance he had long been familiar, rose before him intolerably. A light tap at the inner door of Wayne’s room caused him to leap to his feet and stand staring for a moment at a shadow on the ground glass. The door led into Roger Craighill’s room, and as he had been thinking of his father, the knock struck upon his senses ominously. He hesitated an instant, curbing an impulse to fly; then the door opened cautiously, and Joe Denny slipped in, seated himself carelessly on a table in the centre of the room, and nursed his knee.