The younger man laughed grimly. "Wait till you know the full size of the provocation, Doctor. I'm not half as bad as I might be. Another man would have left him to burn--here and hereafter." The doctor said no more. It was not his province to make or meddle in the quarrel between the Gordons and the Farleys. And Tom also was silent, having many things to render him reflective. When he was put down at Woodlawn it was after one o'clock. Yet he sat for an hour or more on the veranda, smoking many pipes and trying as he could to prefigure the future in the light of the night's happenings. What an insufferable animal Farley was, to be sure!--with the love of a woman like Ardea Dabney failing to keep him on the hither side of common decency! Would Ardea break with him, now that she knew the truth? Tom shook his head. Not she; she would stand by him all the more stoutly, if not for love, then for pride's sake. That was the fine thing in her loyalty. That thought led to another. When they were married, there would have to be a beginning in a new field. Chiawassee was gone, and the Farley fortune with it; and the new field would be a bald necessity. Tom decided that not even Ardea's pride and fortitude could face the looks askance of the Mountain View Avenue folk. He measured the country colonists justly. They might have forgiven the moral lapse, though that was not the side they had turned toward him. Yet he fancied that when the business failure should be super-added, the Farley sins would become too multitudinous for the broadest mantle of charity to cover. "Which brings on more talk," he mused, pulling thoughtfully at the pipe. "They can't start in the new diggings without money. Anyway, Vincent's no moneymaker; and if the look on a man's face counts for anything, old Colonel Duxbury has made his last flight from the promoting perch. O Lord!"--rising with a cavernous yawn and a mighty stretching of his arms overhead,--"I reckon it's up to me to go on doing all the things I don't want to do; that I didn't in the least mean to do. Somebody ought to write a book and call it _Saints Inveterate_. It would have simplified things a whole lot if I could have left him to be cremated after all." * * * * * Mr. Vancourt Henniker was not greatly surprised when Tom Gordon asked for a private interview on the morning following the final closing down of all the industries at Gordonia. Without being in Gordon's confidence, or in that of American Aqueduct, the banker had been shrewdly putting two and two together and applying the result as a healing plaster to the stock he had taken as security for the final loan to Colonel Duxbury.