Peter had left home to go to Oxford with a Rhodes scholarship, he found himself unexpectedly endowed to the extent of over three million dollars under the will of a late wealthy patient, so that he might, in the old man's own words, "devote himself, without the fret and fever of earning a livelihood as a practitioner, to the noble and limitless work of a bacteriologist for the benefit of suffering humanity all over the world," it was for the sake of his children that he offered up thanks. With what immense pride he notified the authorities at Harvard that his son was independent of the scholarship, which was free to send another man to Oxford. With what keen pleasure he was able to buy Graham a seat on the Stock Exchange, bring Belle out as a débutante and send his little Ethel to the best possible school. These things he could do, and did, but he could not and had never been able to do for them a better thing than all these,--win their confidence, their deep affection and their friendship. That gift had been killed in him. It could not be acquired, taught or purchased, and he had always been as much out of touch with his boys and girls as though he were divided from them by a great stone wall. It had always been with them, "Look out! Here's father!" instead of "Hello! Here's Dad!" His entrance into their playroom was the signal for silence. The sight of his studious face and short-sighted eyes and distrait, shy manner chilled them and reduced them to quietude and self-consciousness and suspicion. If he had treated them always as human beings, played with them, sat on the floor and built houses with their bricks, thrown open the door of his study to them, if only for half an hour every day, so that there might be no possibility of its becoming a Blue Room; if he had, as they grew into the habit of thinking and observing and remembering, told them about himself and his own boyhood and in this way inculcated a mutual interest, a desire to respond and open out; if, before the two boys had gone to college he had had the courage to act on the earnest advice of a friend and speak to them on the vital question of sex, give them the truth as he so well knew it and warn them bravely and rightly of the inevitable pitfalls that lined their youthful path, no brick wall would have existed and he would have been their pal as well as their father,--a combination altogether irresistible. As it was Hunter Guthrie's wife, who loved him deeply and devotedly and recognized in him a great man as well as a most unselfish father, was obliged to lie in reply to his questions. She would rather have died, then and there, than hurt him and bring down his house about his ears. The sad and tragic part of it all was that she knew utterly that no good, no change could be brought about by telling the truth. It was too late. VII