He stared thoughtfully at the floor and Lindsay waited. Caroline ran up the front stairs, and he had counted each step before the man went on. "So I sent the money regular every quarter," he muttered, as if continuing some tale, "and I'd go to see him sometimes all dressed up, and I tried to talk like he did. He thought I was traveling and didn't want to be bothered. But I couldn't see him much--was I going to drag him down, just as I'd got him started right? Not much. 'Go and visit your friends, o' course,' I used to tell him, 'and you can write to me.' The best schools I picked out, the very best. And they came high. But I was good for it." He shifted in his chair and rubbed his eyes. "I had a hunch when I bought the ticket," he muttered. "It just come over me--'you ought not to go to a place you got the idea of from Jim,' something seemed to say to me, 'it's unlucky.' And everything so still, and the stuff so easy--'twas like finding it in the road. And the last time, too--the last time." "But Jim--he thought--" Lindsay prompted. A dreadful curiosity held him. "So then he wrote, 'of course it's Yale, dad,' he wrote, 'we're all going up together. You don't mind if it costs a little to get settled, do you?' And was I going to go to him--he was head of his class, mind you--and say, the Trust has treated me the way I wouldn't treat a dog--it's all up with me and you? I can go back and be foreman again at the works--we're bought up, chewed up and spit out like a wad o' paper?' Not much, I guess. No. Here's where I quit the honesty game, I said, for it don't pay. You stole my patent, and I shut up because I couldn't afford to fight you, and you raised me and raised me--and let me into the firm when you knew it was going to bust! Now, I says, since my boy's education has been stole from me, I'll steal it back, I says, and only from them that can afford it, too! And I'll use no lawyer to do it, either, and we'll have no trick-work with papers. I'll get it straight from the wives and daughters of the big thieves that pass the plate on Sundays." Lindsay listened to Caroline moving over their heads; her steps seemed the only reality in this horrid dream. "It--it will just about kill Jim," he said slowly. "It would have killed him not to go to college," the man returned sharply, "and he had a right to go." "But, good heavens, there are ways--he could have earned money--he's clever enough to work his way through a dozen colleges!" Lindsay cried despairingly.