ambition, the strongest force in his character. Between him and his father there had existed ever since his babyhood a curious, silent, yet ineradicable hostility. Whether the fault was Oliver's or Harry's, whether the father resented the energy and the initiative of his son, or the son resented the indifference and the self-absorption of his father, Virginia had never discovered. For years she fought against admitting the discord between them. Then, at last, on the occasion of a quarrel, when it was no longer possible to dissemble, she followed Oliver into his study, which had once been the "back parlour," and pleaded with him to show a little patience, a little sympathy with his son. "He's a boy any father would be proud of----" she finished, almost in tears. "I know he is," he answered irritably, "but the truth is he rubs me the wrong way. I suppose the trouble is that you have spoiled him." "But he isn't spoiled. Everybody says----" "Oh, everybody!" he murmured disdainfully, with a shrug of his fine shoulders. He looked back at her with the sombre fire of anger still in his eyes, and she saw, without trying to see, without even knowing that she did see, all the changes that years had wrought in his appearance. Physically, he was a finer animal than he had been when she married him, for time, which had sapped her youth and faded her too delicate bloom, had but added a deeper colour to the warm brown of his skin, a steadier glow to his eyes, a more silvery gloss to his hair. At forty, he was a handsomer man than he had been at twenty-five, yet, in spite of this, some virtue had gone out of him--here, too, as in life, "something was missing." The generous impulses, the high heart for adventure, the enthusiasm of youth, and youth's white rage for perfection--where were these? It was as if a rough hand had passed over him, coarsening here, blotting out there, accentuating elsewhere. The slow, insidious devil of compromise had done its work. Once he had made one of the small band of fighters who fight not for advantage, but for the truth; now he stood in that middle place with the safe majority who are "neither for God nor for His enemies." Life had done this to him--life and Virginia. It was not only that he had "grown soft," as he would have expressed it, nor was it even wholly that he had grown selfish, for the canker which ate at the roots of his personality had affected not his character merely, but the very force of his will. Though the imperative he obeyed had always been not "I must," but "I want," his natural loftiness of purpose might have saved him from the results of his weakness had he not lost gradually the capacity for successful resistance with which he had started. If only in the beginning she had upheld not his inclinations, but his convictions; if only she had sought not to soothe his weakness, but to stimulate his strength; if only she had seen for once the thing as it was, not as it ought to have been----