Mrs. Moreland, becoming disquieted by the absence of both her husband and her son, went in search of them. She thought possibly they had gone back to the bar of the Newberry House, but an inquiry there told her that they had not returned. So she hurried the few intervening blocks, and seeing the light in Junior’s room, entered her home and climbed the stairs to find him helpless, stretched on his bed, his father kneeling beside him removing his shoes. As a rule Mrs. Moreland let no word pass her lips that would irritate her husband. She had learned through the years that she had lived with him, to know what lay in the depths of his eyes. She had no desire to plumb the depths of cruelty of which she vaguely felt him capable. She stood one long instant studying the picture before her and then she turned to him and said deliberately: “How do you like your work, Martin? Are you pleased with what you are succeeding in making of your son?” The Senior Moreland threw up his head and favoured his wife with a full glance. In her eyes there was written large the love with which she yearned over her boy. Something about her expression made more nearly an appeal than anything she could have said to him. There was not much mirth in the laugh he forced to his lips. “Don’t be an everlasting killjoy,” he said to her banteringly. “It’s all right for youth to have its fling. I followed him because I expected the strain of the night to end like this. He’ll be all right in the morning.” Arising, he offered her his arm with extreme politeness and escorted her from the sight of the boy. Once the door was closed after them, he gripped her arm until his fingers cut into it cruelly. He rushed her down the hall faster than she could comfortably walk and thrust her into her room so roughly and forcibly that she fell upon her bed. Standing over her, he said to her: “If you can’t manage to be anything better than a sickly idiot, you keep out of men’s affairs altogether.” And then, on a wave evoked by the nausea on her face, he added: “He’ll be all right in the morning, I tell you!”