Seven or eight years before, he had come from the little country town of his birth with a past such as places of the kind are too fatally apt to fasten upon the boys who grow up in them. Witty, talented, good-hearted, Heaven only knows to what terrible influences Lawson Barr’s idle youth had been subject; and nobody in his new home had cared to hear. Scandal may be interesting, but one instinctively avoids filth. It was an understood thing, when he first came to Woodside, that his brother-in-law, Joseph Leverich, had lifted him out of “a scrape” in response to the appeal of a weeping aunt, and had brought the boy back with him to get him away from village temptations and substitute the more bracing conditions of city life, where entertainment that was not vicious could be had. The experiment had apparently worked well; in the eight years which Lawson Barr had passed in Woodside, no one had anything bad to tell of him. He was more inclined to the society of men than of women, and shared the imputation of being fond of what is called “a good time”; but he was never seen really under the influence of liquor. Shy in general company at first, he became rather a favorite afterwards in a certain way; he was fond of sports, and was very kind to women and children; he was also witty and clever, and played entrancingly on the piano when he was in the mood; he was one of those gifted people who can play, after their own fashion, on any instrument. When he felt pleasantly inclined, no one was more amiable; in another humor, he spoke to no one. He had become engaged to a girl in good standing, after a summer flirtation. The girl had come there on a visit, and the engagement lasted only until her return and the revelation of his prospects to parental inspection. For Lawson never had any prospects—or, at least, they never solidly materialized. He never kept his positions for more than a few months at a time. There was always a different reason for this, more or less unimportant on each occasion, but the fact remained the same. Strangers whom he met invariably took a great interest in him, and, captivated by his undoubted cleverness and charm, were enthusiastic in finding new openings for him, ready to champion hotly his merits against that most galling of all criticism, which consists in the simple statement of adverse facts. “You will never be able to make anything out of him,” was a sentence which his relays of friends were sure to hand on to one another. One summer Lawson had come down so far as to keep the golf-grounds in order—a position, however, which he filled in such a well-bred manner, and with so many niceties of consideration for everyone’s comfort, that to have him around considerably enhanced the pleasures of the game, and the players were sorry when he bought a commutation-ticket once more and started going in to town mornings as one of them.