General Penfrit occupied his customary chair by a Fifth-avenue window, and the newcomer smiled with pleasure to find him there.  General Penfrit shared many interests with him, and was willing to share as many more, so long as Thomas Burton’s bridge game continued to be of the contributory type.

Burton strolled over, swinging his stick, and nodded with a bland smile, but to his dismay the general glanced up and acknowledged the greeting without warmth.  Perhaps his old friend was not feeling well today.

“I was wondering,” suggested Burton, “whether we couldn’t arrange a little rubber.”  He caught the eye of a waiter at the same moment and beckoned.  “What will yours be, general?” he genially inquired.

“I don’t believe I care to play.”  The voice was chilling at the start and became more icy with each added syllable, “and I won’t have anything to drink.”

Tom Burton stood looking down somewhat blankly.

“Nothing to drink?” he repeated in a perfectly warrantable astonishment.  His ears must have tricked him.

The general rose stiffly.  “With you—­no,” he spoke curtly, and took himself away with a waddle of studied dignity.  For a full minute Hamilton Burton’s father gazed vacantly out at the avenue, then he turned on his heel.  Henry O’Horrissy was just entering the door and with him were two other members of a little group which had lunched and chatted and played bridge inseparably for several years.  Each knew all the others’ anecdotes and could laugh at the proper moments.  They formed one of those small cliques of intimates into which this club resolved itself, and Tom Burton was of their valued brotherhood.

“Good-afternoon, gentlemen,” accosted Burton.  “How are you all today?”

With three silent nods the trio at the door turned and drifted aimlessly across to the billiard-room.

Tom Burton went and sat alone by a window.  Slowly a brick-like flush spread and deepened on his full face.  This club life had become very important to him—­even indispensable.  There was nothing with which to replace it.  He wheeled his chair so that he might be plainly seen from the door, and as man after man came in, with whom he had spent his time and his son’s money, men who had been pleased to court the father of the great Hamilton Montagu Burton, he genially accosted them—­and one after another they returned greetings of frigid formality.

Then he turned his chair with its back to the room and looked out and the stubborn pride died in his eyes and his face grew old and pathetic.  There was no further room for doubt.  He was tasting ostracism and being included in this wave of hatred for his son, which he had regarded as newspaper rubbish.  He leaned forward with his gloved hands on his cane and once or twice under his fastidiously trimmed beard, his lips twitched painfully.  Finally he rose, ordering his next cocktail over a hotel bar, and though the stubbornness of pride forced him back on the morrow to lunch at his accustomed club table, he lunched alone, and was grateful for the solicitous courtesy of the negro who served him.