If no man is a hero to his valet, surely no boy can be a hero to his tutor, and I may as well admit that glorious as Jerry’s defeat had been, I had ceased to reckon him among the perfect creations of this world.  Nowhere, I think, have I hailed Jerry as a hero.  I have not meant to place him upon a pedestal.  At the Manor, before he came to New York, he did no wrong, because the things that were good were pleasant to him and because original sin—­Eheu! I was beginning to wonder!  Original sin!  John Benham had ignored its existence and I had thought him wise.  What was original sin?  And if its origin was not within, where did it originate and how?  If the boy had already been inoculated with the germ of sin, was he conscious of it?  And did he yield to it voluntarily or unconsciously or both?  And if unconscious of sin, was he morally responsible for its commission?  These and many other vexed theological questions flitted anxiously through my mind and brought me to a careful scrutiny of Jerry’s acts as I knew them.  To engage in a prize fight, whatever the prize, whether money or merely the love of woman, if a venial, was not a mortal sin.  To be sure, anger was a mortal sin and Jerry had yielded to it.  Such fighting as Jerry had done, was not and could not by dint of argument become a part of any philosophy that I had taught him.  He had sinned.  He would sin again.  As Miss Gore had said, my dream castle was tottering—­it had tottered and was falling.  Jerry, my Perfect Man, at the first contact with the world felt the contagion of its innate depravity and corruption.  The more I thought of Jerry’s character, his ingenuous belief in the good of all things, the more it seemed to me that it was only a question of the strength of Jerry’s spiritual health to resist the ravages of spiritual disease.  You see, already I had thrown my philosophy to the winds.  For where I had once planned that Jerry should go through fire unscorched, it was now merely become a question of the amount of his scorching.

I bade Jack good-by, after hearing of the bad quarter-hour he had spent with Ballard, Senior, downtown, and made my way to my train for Horsham Manor in no very happy frame of mind.  Had I known what new phase of Jerry’s character was soon to be revealed to me, God knows I should have been still more unhappy.  Jerry was not at the Manor when I arrived there.  For some reasons best known to Marcia Van Wyck and himself it had been decided to stay for awhile longer in town, and it was not until over a month later that Jerry arrived bag and baggage in his machine with Christopher.  He greeted me cheerfully enough, but I was not quite satisfied with his appearance.  The marks of his fight with Clancy had almost, if not quite, disappeared, and while he had taken on much of his normal weight, he had little color and his eyes were dull.  He smoked cigarettes constantly, lighting one from another, and on the afternoon and evening of the day of his arrival, sat moodily frowning