Usher followed him indoors. Some time later Miss Lanyon came down, having changed her dress for dinner, and leaned against the jamb of the creeper-covered porch and drank in the softness of the summer evening with the country-bred gentlewoman's vague mingling of happiness and regret. She had heard of the engagement. It had made her sad. Why had it not been Sylvester instead of Roderick? She sighed over the grave of her old maid's vicarious romance. A footstep behind her caused her to turn. It was Mr. Usher, buttoning his old frock-coat. His face showed grave benevolence. “A father lives in his children,” he said, after receiving her reluctant congratulations. “I live in my son.” The dinner-bell rang. “I must go,” he continued. “I came to see my old friend on business. He is so good. His time is always at the disposal of his friends.” “I told Dorothy this evening that he was a saint,” she said. Usher squeezed her hand impressively. “He is indeed, Miss Lanyon. He is indeed.” But Matthew sat in his library chair staring in front of him in agony of spirit. He had yielded. The trace of the writing was there on the fresh blotting-paper before him. The strong man writhed under the humiliation of defeat. The proud, sensitive gentleman was tortured in his Nessus shirt of dishonour. And it comforted him not that it was for his son's sake. He felt as if he had ransomed him at the price of Ella's deliverance to the Minotaur. CHAPTER X--SYLVESTER DOES BATTLE Loss of faith in all through the faithlessness of one is a common and a tragic phenomenon. It is vain for the robust-minded to prove the illogic of the conclusion, which is one arrived at more from the emotional than the logical faculties of the brain. The phenomenon occurs only in men of a certain temperament. They are endowed with powers of intense individual passion, but lack that universality of sympathy which makes for breadth of judgment. To narrow the proposition to a particular case, they take one woman, not after long and patient deliberation,--that is the supreme pity of it,--but haphazard, on the impulse of a great emotion, and glorify her as the queen of all women. She becomes inevitably the test of a sex. The poor human touchstone fails, and a whole sex is condemned. To the commoner sort this loss of faith matters little, for the nobility of a great faith was never in them; they cultivate an easy-going cynicism, and that is all. But the men whose lives are broken, who feel within them the horrible weight of a dead ideal, are of nobler mould, and therein lies the piteousness of the tragedy.