And conscious of its foulness he had planned an evil thing. It had crossed his mind like a dark shadow, obscuring the fair horizon of his better nature the moment he looked upon the face of the woman his father was about to marry. He had known her first, that was the beautiful irony of it; and he was keeping silent because in her, installed as his father’s wife, he saw a means of retaliation. His hatred of his father was no growth of a day, and the face in the locket, the letter from the woman herself that he had read the night he began his latest debauch, had hardened it into a fixed idea. The knowledge that his father had brought him here to-day merely to advertise the perfect amity of their relationship angered him; and now Colonel Craighill dismissed him urbanely, saying that he would take his cigar with Fraser, the short, grave, round-faced corporation lawyer, who was soon, it appeared, to accept the nation for his client. Wingfield, with his eye on the situation, carried Wayne below for a game of billiards. CHAPTER VI BEFORE A PORTRAIT BY SARGENT Wayne Craighill’s education had been planned by his father on broad lines. The Craighills had of old been Presbyterians, but Colonel Craighill was no bigot; therefore, in keeping with his generous attitude in such matters, Wayne was sent to a preparatory school in Vermont conducted under Episcopalian auspices. Moreover, the head of St. John’s was a personal friend, whom Colonel Craighill knew well. Nothing could be better for the boy than a few years spent under the eye of the famous master. The transition from the Presbyterianism in which he was born to the High Church school was abrupt. The very vocabulary of worship was different; the choral services in the beautiful chapel appealed to his emotional nature, and he found a quiet joy in his own participation in the singing when he attained in due course to a place in the orderly offices of the choir. From the preparatory school Wayne went to the Institute of Technology. His mother had pleaded for the law; but Colonel Craighill pointed out the superiority of scientific education in a day when science guarded so many of the approaches to success. And Wayne, born among the iron hills, was persuaded that his best course lay in fitting himself for a career in keeping with the greatest interests of his native state, and so his father prevailed, and Wayne had, not without much stress and resistance of spirit, taken his degree in science. Certain aspects of mining, and of the chemistry of the forge had appealed to him, but rather to his strong imagination than to any practical use he saw in his knowledge. He had spent a summer in a large colliery, obedient to his father’s wish that the young man should apply and test theory before he had a chance to forget the teaching of the schools; and Wayne had entered into this with relish. But while he had taken into his own strong hands every tool used in mine labour, and fed boiler furnaces