could not wholly conceal his forebodings.  “It’s lucky for the boy,” he reflected, “that Hiram left him a good home as long as his mother’s alive.  After she’s gone—­and the five thousand, if I get it back—­I suppose he’ll drop down and down, and end by clerking it somewhere.”  With a survey of Arthur’s fashionable attire, “I should say he might do fairly well in a gent’s furnishing store in one of those damn cities.”  The old man was not unfeeling—­far from it; he had simply been educated by long years of experience out of any disposition to exaggerate the unimportant in the facts of life.  “He’ll be better off and more useful as a clerk than he would be as a pattern of damnfoolishness and snobbishness.  So, Hiram was right anyway I look at it, and no matter how it comes out.  But—­it did take courage to make that will!”

“Well, good day, judge,” Arthur was saying, to end both their reveries.  “I must,” he laughed curtly, “‘get a move on.’”

“Good day, and God bless you, boy,” said the old man, with a hearty earnestness that, for the moment, made Arthur’s eyes less hard.  “Take your time, settling on what to do.  Don’t be in a hurry.”

“On the contrary,” said Arthur.  “I’m going to make up my mind at once.  Nothing stales so quickly as a good resolution.”

CHAPTER XIV

SIMEON

A crisis does not create character, but is simply its test.  The young man who entered the gates of No. 64 Jefferson Street at five that afternoon was in all respects he who left them at a quarter before four, though he seemed very different to himself.  He went direct to his own room and did not descend until the supper bell sounded—­that funny little old jangling bell he and Del had striven to have abolished in the interests of fashionable progress, until they learned that in many of the best English houses it is a custom as sacredly part of the ghostly British Constitution as the bathless bath of the basin, as the jokeless joke of the pun, as the entertainment that entertains not, as the ruler that rules not and the freedom that frees not.  When he appeared in the dining-room door, his mother and Del were already seated.  His mother, her white face a shade whiter, said:  “I expect you’d better sit—­there.”  She neither pointed nor looked, but they understood that she meant Hiram’s place.  It was her formal announcement of her forgiveness and of her recognition of the new head of the family.  With that in his face that gave Adelaide a sense of the ending of a tension within her, he seated himself where his father had always sat.

It was a silent supper, each one absorbed in thoughts which could not have been uttered, no one able to find any subject that would not make overwhelming the awful sense of the one that was not there and never again would be.  Mrs. Ranger spoke once.  “How did you find Janet?” she said to Arthur.

His face grew red, with gray underneath.  After a pause he answered:  “Very well.”  Another pause, then:  “Our engagement is broken off.”