“Show me how to help it--show me how to _want_ to help it!” spluttered the banker. “I don't want to keep my temper! I don't want to hold my tongue! I wish the law of the land would let me take him, big as he is, and thrash him on the streets before the very folks that call him, as some have, an improvement on his stingy old daddy. Once I thought I had him. Once I thought I'd caught him dickering with bank funds, and I had started to have him put in limbo when he showed me I was wrong. That's the kind of man I am! I put honesty above everything else, and I won't hide dishonor, even in my own blood.” “Well, I'm off,” Wynn Dearing said. “I see I only keep you going on the very topic I have warned you against. Good-night.” As the young doctor was approaching the gate he saw a figure in gray, enveloped, as to head and shoulders, in an old cashmere shawl, emerge from a clump of plum-trees near the fence. It was Fred Walton's stepmother, a tall, thin woman of more than sixty years of age, and even dim as the starlight was he noticed the hardness of her features as she clutched the shawl under her chin and eagerly peered out from its folds. “Oh, we have had a day of it, Dr. Dearing!” she said, familiarly, and with a dry, forced laugh. “When you came in at the gate just now I made the same mistake Simon did--I thought it was Fred, and hung back at the side of the house to hear the row. I reckon the boy has decided he's had enough tongue-lashing for one day, and don't intend to sleep here to-night. I don't blame his father one bit,” she ran on, volubly, “and I have the first one to meet who really does. Fred certainly keeps himself in the public eye. There is hardly a day that some fresh report don't crop out as to his scrapes. And the match-makers! Great goodness! They have enough to keep ten towns the size of this busy. They are eager to see now which Fred will tie to for life: your sister, with all her money and fine old name, or that strip of a girl who paints and teaches for a bare living. Some say she is daft about him, and that if your uncle kicks him out he will settle on her. That's what folks say, you know. The truth is, I live sort of out of the way, and don't hear all that is going the rounds.” “That is a matter I am not posted on, Mrs. Walton,” Dearing said, as he opened the gate and politely raised his hat in parting. “I must hurry. I only wanted to see Fred a minute.”