College boys, however, are a curious folk.  The mind of youth is virtuous.  It is later on in life that it becomes sordid.  Ferdy wrote his father that he had the prize, and that Norman, his only rival, had given up the fight.  Mrs. Wickersham openly boasted of her son’s success and of her motive, and sent him money lavishly.  Young Wickersham’s ambition, however, like that of many another man, o’erleaped itself.  Wickersham drew about him many companions, but they were mainly men of light weight, roisterers and loafers, whilst the better class of his fellow-students quickly awoke to a true realization of the case.  A new element was being introduced into college politics.  The recognition of danger was enough to set the best element in the college to meet it.  At the moment when Ferdy Wickersham felt himself victor, and abandoned himself to fresh pleasures, a new and irresistible force unexpectedly arose which changed the fate of the day.  Wickersham tried to stem the current, but in vain.  It was a tidal wave.  Ferdy Wickersham faced defeat, and he could not stand it.  He suddenly abandoned college, and went off, it was said, with a coryphee.  His father and mother did not know of it for some time after he had left.

Mr. Wickersham received the first intimation of it in the shape of a draft which came to him from some distant point.  When Mrs. Wickersham learned of it, she fell into a consuming rage, and then took to her bed.  The downfall of her hopes and of her ambition had come through the person she loved best on earth.  Finally she became so ill that Mr. Wickersham telegraphed a peremptory order to his son to come home, and after a reasonable time the young man appeared.

His mother’s joy at meeting him overshadowed everything else with her, and the prodigal was received by her with that forgiveness which is both the weakness and the strength of a mother’s heart.  The father, however, had been struck as deeply as the mother.  His ambition, if of a different kind, had been quite as great as that of Mrs. Wickersham, and the hard-headed, keen-sighted man, who had spent his life fighting his way to the front, often with little consideration for the rights of others, felt that one of his motives and one of his rewards had perished together.

The interview that took place in his office between him and his son was one which left its visible stamp on the older man, and for a time appeared to have had an effect even on the younger, with all his insolence and impervious selfishness.  When Aaron Wickersham unlocked his private door and allowed his son and heir to go out, the clerks in the outer office knew by the young man’s face, quite as well as by the rumbles of thunder which had come through the fast-closed door, that the “old man” had been giving the young one a piece of his mind.

At first the younger man had been inclined to rebel; but for once in his life he found that he had passed the limit of license, and his father, whom he had rather despised as foolishly pliable, was unexpectedly his master.  He laid before Ferdy, with a power which the latter could not but acknowledge, the selfishness and brutality of his conduct since he was a boy.  He told him of his own earlier privations, of his labors, of his ambitions.