“Of course; I knew you’d do that, sooner or later,” returned the play-boy, with his best impish grin. “That is what you get for having a conscience. What did he say?” “He was very decent about it; doesn’t seem to bear malice. Shook hands with me when I got up to go and said he couldn’t blame me so very much for ‘losing my temper.’ Altogether, he made me feel like a fool--or rather like a whited sepulchre.” “Why the simile?” queried the magazine reader. “Because I profess better things, and he doesn’t. He is a hopeless pagan, but he shows a better Christian spirit than I did.” This time Bromley’s grin was good-naturedly cynical. “Deep down in your heart, Philip, you don’t really believe any such thing as that; you know you don’t,” he said accusingly. “Why don’t I?” “Because, at this very moment, the old self-righteous Puritan in you is patting itself on the back for its superior virtue and for the humility in which you kept the letter of the Gospel to your own satisfaction and comfort.” “Oh, to the devil with you and your hair-splitting philosophy!” said Philip impatiently; and, relighting his pipe, he went on with his reading of the Howells novel. XVI THE spring of 1881, memorable for the jangling aftermath of the bitter factional political struggle of the previous year which had resulted in the nomination and election of President Garfield, waned to its close, and on the second of July the nation was shocked by the news flashed over the wires of the shooting of the President in a Washington railway station by Charles J. Guiteau. Isolated by distance from the populous East and Middle West, the new Colorado yet felt the shock and responded to it. Partisanship and the harsh pre-election epithets of “329” and the anti-Chinese cry of “Remember the Morey letter” were forgotten, and the city of the plain marked its sorrow and indignation, as it did everything else, with a magnificent Western gesture. Philip, now following out his plan of a blind search for his father in the various mountain mining-camps, returned to Denver early in the week following the national tragedy with other failures to add to those which had gone before. “You mustn’t let it dig too deep into you,” Bromley urged sympathetically, after the story of the added failures had been told. “You know you admitted in the beginning that there was only the slenderest chance that you might turn him up here in Colorado. You haven’t had any later clues, have you?” “It is all groping in the dark,” was the discouraged answer. “All I am sure of is that he would bury himself out of sight. To be the first of his name to have the finger of suspicion pointed at him, however unjustly ... you’d have to be New England born yourself to know how these things cut to the bone, Harry.”