The other son, Terence, was some eight years younger, and seemed the product of a wholly different race.  The contrast between Michael’s sandy skin and long gaunt visage and this dark boy’s handsome, rounded face, with its prettily curling black hair, large, heavily fringed brown eyes, and delicately modelled features, was not more obvious than their temperamental separation.  This second lad had been away for years at school,—­indeed, at a good many schools, for no one seemed to manage to keep him long.  He had been with the Jesuits at Georgetown, with the Christian Brothers at Manhattan; the sectarian Mt.  St. Mary’s and the severely secular Annapolis had both been tried, and proved misfits.  The young man was home again now, and save that his name had become Theodore, he appeared in no wise changed from the beautiful, wilful, bold, and showy boy who had gone away in his teens.  He was still rather small for his years, but so gracefully moulded in form, and so perfectly tailored, that the fact seemed rather an advantage than otherwise.  He never dreamed of going near the wagon-works, but he did go a good deal—­in fact, most of the time—­to the Nedahma Club.  His mother spoke often to her friends about her fears for his health.  He never spoke to his friends about his mother at all.

The second Mrs. Madden did not, indeed, appeal strongly to the family pride.  She had been a Miss Foley, a dress-maker, and an old maid.  Jeremiah had married her after a brief widowerhood, principally because she was the sister of his parish priest, and had a considerable reputation for piety.  It was at a time when the expansion of his business was promising certain wealth, and suggesting the removal to Octavius.  He was conscious of a notion that his obligations to social respectability were increasing; it was certain that the embarrassments of a motherless family were.  Miss Foley had shown a good deal of attention to his little children.  She was not ill-looking; she bore herself with modesty; she was the priest’s sister—­the niece once removed of a vicar-general.  And so it came about.

Although those most concerned did not say so, everybody could see from the outset the pity of its ever having come about at all.  The pious and stiffly respectable priest’s sister had been harmless enough as a spinster.  It made the heart ache to contemplate her as a wife.  Incredibly narrow-minded, ignorant, suspicious, vain, and sour-tempered, she must have driven a less equable and well-rooted man than Jeremiah Madden to drink or flight.  He may have had his temptations, but they made no mark on the even record of his life.  He only worked the harder, concentrating upon his business those extra hours which another sort of home-life would have claimed instead.  The end of twenty years found him a rich man, but still toiling pertinaciously day by day, as if he had his wage to earn.  In the great house which had been built to please, or rather placate, his wife, he kept