As the beauty and quiet of the place with its mottling of light and shade took possession of him he slackened his pace, lagging a little behind his uncle, and began to look about him, drinking in the loveliness of the season.  The very air breathed tenderness, peace, and comfort.  Certainly his father’s heart must be softening toward him; surely his bitterness could not last.  No word, it is true, had yet come to him from Moorlands, though only the week before his mother had been in to see him, bringing him news of his father and what her son’s absence had meant to every one, old Alec especially.  She had not, she said, revived the subject of the boy’s apology; she had thought it better to wait for the proper opportunity, which might come any day, but certain it was that his father was most unhappy, for he would shut himself up hours at a time in his library, locking the door and refusing to open it, no matter who knocked, except to old John Gorsuch, his man of business.  She had also heard him tossing on his bed at night, or walking about his room muttering to himself.

Did these things, he wondered on this bright spring morning, mean a final reconciliation, or was he, after all, to be doomed to further disappointment?  Days had passed since his mother had assured him of this change in his father, and still no word had come from him.  Had he at last altered his mind, or, worse still, had his old obstinacy again taken possession of him, hardening his heart so that he would never relent?  And so, with his mind as checkered as the shadow-flecked path on which they stepped, he pursued his way beneath the wide-spreading trees.

When the two had crossed the street St. George’s eye rested upon a group on the sidewalk of the club.  The summer weather generally emptied the coffee-room of most of its habitues, sending many of them to the easy-chairs on the sprinkled pavement, one or two tipped back against the trees, or to the balconies and front steps.  With his arm in Harry’s he passed from one coterie to another in the hope that he might catch some word which would be interesting enough to induce him to fill one of the chairs, even for a brief half-hour, but nothing reached his ears except politics and crops, and he cared for neither.  Harding—­the pessimist of the club—­a man who always had a grievance (and this time with reason, for the money stringency was becoming more acute every day), tried to beguile him into a seat beside him, but he shook his head.  He knew all about Harding, and wanted none of his kind of talk—­certainly not to-day.

“Think of it!” he had heard the growler say to Judge Pancoast as he was about to pass his chair—­“the Patapsco won’t give me a cent to move my crops, and I hear all the others are in the same fix.  You can’t get a dollar on a house and lot except at a frightful rate of interest.  I tell you everything is going to ruin.  How the devil do you get on without money, Temple?” He was spread out in his seat, his legs apart, his fat face turned up, his small fox eyes fixed on St. George.