The boy need not have been worried.  Almost every member, young and old, showed by his manner or some little act of attention that their sympathies were with the exile.  While a few strait-laced old Quakers maintained that it was criminal to blaze away at your fellow-man with the firm intention of blowing the top of his head off, and that Harry should have been hung had Willits died, there were others more discerning—­and they were largely in the majority—­who stood up for the lad however much they deplored the cause of his banishment.  Harry, they argued, had in his brief career been an unbroken colt, and more or less dissipated, but he at least had not shown the white feather.  Boy as he was, he had faced his antagonist with the coolness of a duellist of a score of encounters, letting Willits fire straight at him without so much as the wink of an eyelid; and, when it was all over, had been man enough to nurse his victim back to consciousness.  Moreover—­and this counted much in his favor—­he had refused to quarrel with his irate father, or even answer him.  “Behaved himself like a thoroughbred, as he is,” Dorsey Sullivan, a famous duellist, had remarked in recounting the occurrence to a non-witness.  “And I must say, sir, that Talbot served him a scurvy trick, and I don’t care who hears me say it.”  Furthermore —­and this made a great impression—­that rather than humiliate himself, the boy had abandoned the comforts of his palatial home at Moorlands and was at the moment occupying a small, second-story back room (all, it is true, Gentleman George could give him), where he was to be found any hour of the day or night that his uncle needed him in attendance upon that prince of good fellows.

One other thing that counted in his favor, and this was conclusive with the Quakers—­and the club held not a few—­was that no drop of liquor of any kind had passed the boy’s lips since the eventful night when St. George prepared the way for their first reconciliation.

Summed up, then, whatever Harry had been in the past, the verdict at the present speaking was that he was a brave, tender-hearted, truthful fellow who, in the face of every temptation, had kept his word.  Moreover, it was never forgotten that he was Colonel Talbot Rutter’s only son and heir, so that no matter what the boy did, or how angry the old autocrat might be, it could only be a question of time before his father must send for him and everything at Moorlands go on as before.

It was on one of these glorious never-to-be-forgotten spring days, then, a week or more after St. George had given up the fight with Kate—­a day which Harry remembered all the rest of his life—­that he and his uncle left the house to spend the afternoon, as was now their custom, at the Chesapeake.  The two had passed the early hours of the day at the Relay House fishing for gudgeons, the dogs scampering the hills, and having changed their clothes for something cooler, had entered the park by the gate opposite the Temple Mansion, as being nearest to the club; a path Harry loved, for he and Kate had often stepped it together—­and then again, it was the shortest cut to her house.