Wayne had really believed, like everyone else, that his father was a man whose fortune entitled him to be classed with comfortable millionaires--not, indeed, among the Pittsburg collossi, but among the eminently solid and unspectacular rich. As he pondered his computations and scanned the precis derived from them he reached the startling conclusion that his father’s fortune was in reality a huge and unsupported shell. He had begun studying his father’s affairs in the hope of finding some weapon which, at the fitting moment, he might use to humiliate this proud and self-sufficient parent, who had been so intolerant of his sins and weaknesses. Any trifling error or some badly judged investment would have served; but for the fact that his curiosity had been awakened in the beginning as to the amount of his father’s possessions he would have abandoned his researches long before. It was now perfectly clear that Roger Craighill had ceased to be a factor in the coal and iron industries; that he had been gradually relinquishing his holdings in the substantial enterprises with which he had earlier been identified and that he had re-invested his money in securities of little or no standing in the market. These reflected, Wayne realized, his father’s large, imaginative way of viewing “world questions”--as Colonel Craighill called them. For example, his faith in American colonial development was represented in large holdings in Philippine and Porto Rican ventures that struck Wayne as being properly a pendant to an address his father had delivered Somewhere before Something on “America’s Duty to Her Colonies.”