"Aw, you're in fun!" he said, eying me shrewdly. "Father wouldn't talk guff like that! And anyway my name's Peters--Gwynne's just my given name--so it wouldn't be true, see?" Guff like that! These were his sacrilegious words. Nothing could have more stingingly brought home to me the lapse of years, or better illustrated the changes in men's minds. And I might here insert some valuable reflections on the vanity of human achievement, and the hollow and transitory character of fame, if I were not uneasily conscious that Governor Gwynne's renown, even in his heyday, was not of a kind to fill the four corners of the universe; it was only in the opinion of his family that it reached those magnificent proportions. Now he and his deeds are forgotten, even by them; the fires are all dead on that fantastic altar which the Gwynnes tended for so many years with so much misplaced zeal. It is not likely, I think, that little Gwynne will ever be troubled by the problems confronting his father in March of the year of Grace, 1883. In fact, during this time, Gwynne might have been seen any day pondering gloomily before his empty desk, under his grandfather's grimly searching scrutiny, by the hour. The Pallinder business had reached a stage when he could no longer ignore it; yet he could not bring himself to any active measures. Gwynne knew as much as anybody about the colonel's affairs; he had heard certain subdued but very disagreeable rumours. Templeton himself had brought them to him months earlier with a countenance of fright and perplexity. It had not cleared much when he left the office; the little agent could not understand what ailed his patron. He had never known Gwynne to be so indifferent, so careless of the rights and feelings of the other heirs; it was clean out of his character, and Templeton felt with dismay that his surest prop had been removed. If Mr. Peters was becoming as queer as the rest of them, Templeton was almost ready to resign from the management of the Gwynne estate; single-handed, he could not "hold up his end," as he phrased it. In the years of their association he had conceived something like a real affection for the young man, and this change obscurely alarmed and distressed him. Gwynne, about everything else so open, so resourceful, so patient in the control of his difficult kindred, so genially shrewd, would not allow any discussion of the Pallinder delinquency; he shifted the subject, or turned upon Templeton with a manner of such forbidding reticence that the agent shrank discomfited. "Oh, well, Mr. Peters, I--I guess I'd better leave you alone to run your tenants and the family," he would say humbly, reaching for his hat in an apologetic confusion. "I--I ain't ever made such a success of it that I've any call to argue, or advise _you_ how to do," and so would shuffle meekly from the room, leaving the young man, had he known it, in a miserable humiliation. Time and again,