“I have worked my heart out,” he said, “for your mother and for you.  I have never known a moment of rest or of what you call ‘fun.’  I set it before me when your mother promised to marry me that I would make her as good as the first lady in the land—­that is, in New York.  She should have as big a house and as fine a carriage and as handsome frocks as any one of them—­as old Mrs. Wentworth or old Mrs. Brooke of Brookford, who were the biggest people I ever knew.  And I have spent my life for it.  I have grown old before my time.  I have gotten so that things have lost their taste to me; I have done things that I never dreamed I would do to accomplish it.  I have lost the power to sleep working for it, and when you came I thought I would have my reward in you.  I have not only never stinted you, but I have lavished money on you as if I was the richest man in New York.  I wanted you to have advantages that I never had:  as good as Norman Wentworth or any one else.  I have given you things, and seen you throw them away, that I would have crawled on my knees from my old home to this office to get when I was a boy.  And I thought you were going to be my pride and my stay and my reward.  And you said you were doing it, and your mother and I had staked our hearts on you.  And all the time you were running away and lying to me and to her, and not doing one honest lick of work.”

The young man interrupted him.  “That is not so,” he said surlily.

His father pulled out a drawer and took from it a letter.  Spreading it open on his desk, he laid the palm of his open hand on it.  “Not so?  I have got the proof of it here.”  He looked at the young man with level eyes, eyes in which was such a cold gleam that Ferdy’s gaze fell.

“I did not expect you to do it for me,” Aaron Wickersham went on slowly, never taking his eyes from his son’s face, “for I had discovered that you did not care a button for my wishes; but I did think you would do it for your mother.  For she thought you were a god and worshipped you.  She has been talking for ten years of the time when she would go to see you come out at the head of your class.  She was going to Paris to get the clothes to wear if you won, and you—­” His voice broke—­“you won’t even graduate!  What will you think next summer when Mrs. Wentworth is there to see her son, and all the other men and women I know who have sons who graduate there, and your mother—?” The father’s voice broke completely, and he looked away.  Even Ferdy for a moment seemed grave and regretful.  Then after a glance at his father he recovered his composure.

“I’m not to blame,” he said surlily, “if she did.  It was her fault.”

Aaron Wickersham turned on him.

“Stop,” he said in a quiet voice.  “Not another word.  One other word, and, by God!  I’ll box your head off your shoulders.  Say what you please about me, but not one word against her.  I will take you from college and put you to sweeping the floor of this office at twenty dollars a month, and make you live on your salary, too, or starve, if you say one other word.”