A soft stertorous breathing interrupted him.  Tom, chin on chest, was asleep.  Polly, with a significant look, caught her uncle’s eye.  Then her father, after an uneasy restless movement, lifted drowsy lids.

“Deuced warm day,” he said with a bright apologetic laugh.  “I’ve been actually asleep.  Aren’t we near home?”

Frederick nodded to the chauffeur, and the car rolled on.

III

The house that Frederick Travers had built when his prosperity came, was large and costly, sober and comfortable, and with no more pretence than was naturally attendant on the finest country home in the county.  Its atmosphere was just the sort that he and his daughter would create.  But in the days that followed his brother’s home-coming, all this was changed.  Gone was the subdued and ordered repose.  Frederick was neither comfortable nor happy.  There was an unwonted flurry of life and violation of sanctions and traditions.  Meals were irregular and protracted, and there were midnight chafing-dish suppers and bursts of laughter at the most inappropriate hours.

Frederick was abstemious.  A glass of wine at dinner was his wildest excess.  Three cigars a day he permitted himself, and these he smoked either on the broad veranda or in the smoking room.  What else was a smoking room for?  Cigarettes he detested.  Yet his brother was ever rolling thin, brown-paper cigarettes and smoking them wherever he might happen to be.  A litter of tobacco crumbs was always to be found in the big easy chair he frequented and among the cushions of the window-seats.  Then there were the cocktails.  Brought up under the stern tutelage of Isaac and Eliza Travers, Frederick looked upon liquor in the house as an abomination.  Ancient cities had been smitten by God’s wrath for just such practices.  Before lunch and dinner, Tom, aided and abetted by Polly, mixed an endless variety of drinks, she being particularly adept with strange swivel-stick concoctions learned at the ends of the earth.  To Frederick, at such times, it seemed that his butler’s pantry and dining room had been turned into bar-rooms.  When he suggested this, under a facetious show, Tom proclaimed that when he made his pile he would build a liquor cabinet in every living room of his house.

And there were more young men at the house than formerly, and they helped in disposing of the cocktails.  Frederick would have liked to account in that manner for their presence, but he knew better.  His brother and his brother’s daughter did what he and Mary had failed to do.  They were the magnets.  Youth and joy and laughter drew to them.  The house was lively with young life.  Ever, day and night, the motor cars honked up and down the gravelled drives.  There were picnics and expeditions in the summer weather, moonlight sails on the bay, starts before dawn or home-comings at midnight, and often, of nights, the many bedrooms were filled as they had never been before.  Tom must cover all his boyhood ramblings, catch trout again on Bull Creek, shoot quail over Walcott’s Prairie, get a deer on Round Mountain.  That deer was a cause of pain and shame to Frederick.  What if it was closed season?  Tom had triumphantly brought home the buck and gleefully called it sidehill-salmon when it was served and eaten at Frederick’s own table.