In due course Boone presented himself at the office door in Louisville with the three names etched upon its frosted glass, and was conducted by a somewhat supercilious attendant to the Colonel's sanctum. The Colonel came promptly from his chair with an outstretched hand. "Well, my boy," he exclaimed heartily, "I'm right glad to see you." Morgan sat across the desk from his father. Some matter of consultation had brought him there, and the fact that the Colonel had permitted young Wellver's arrival to interrupt it annoyed him. "So you lost your race up there, didn't you?" Colonel Wallifarro laughed. "I wouldn't take it too seriously if I were you. After all, it's not the only campaign you'll ever make." But the eyes of the young mountaineer held the sombreness of his humourless race. "Mr. McCalloway was right ambitious for me, sir," he said. "I hate to have to tell him--that the first fight I ever went into was a--Waterloo." "Still, my boy, it's better to have your Waterloo first and your Austerlitz later--but I know General Prince will want to see you." The lawyer rang a bell and said to the answering boy: "Tell General Prince that Mr. Boone Wellver is in my office." As they sat waiting, Boone inquired: "How is Anne--Miss Masters?" At the mention of the name, Morgan bridled a little, and cast upon him a glance of disapproving scrutiny, but the Colonel, still glancing at the memorandum which he held, replied with no such taint of manner, "Anne's taking a year at college by way of finishing up. I guess you'll miss her after being her guide, counsellor and friend down there in Marlin." "Yes, sir, I'll miss her." So he wouldn't even see Anne! Suddenly the city seemed to Boone Wellver a very stifling, unfriendly and inhuman sort of place in which to live. * * * * * The new law student could have found no more gracious sponsor or learned savant than was Colonel Tom Wallifarro. He could have found no finer example of the Old South--which was now the New South as well; but one friend, though he be a peerless one, does not rob a new and strange world of its loneliness. At college, if a boy had sneered, Boone could resent the slur and offer battle; but here there was no discourtesy upon which to seize--only the bleaker and more intangible thing of difference between himself and others--that he himself felt and which he knew others were seeking to conceal--until politeness became a more trying punishment than affront. He began to feel with a secret sensitiveness contrasts of clothes and manners.