the state!  What magnificent qualities they had, in battle or strategy, and how cunning and shrewd was their generalship!  Year after year they came down from their mountains and fought shoulder to shoulder, and year after year they carried back the lion’s share of the spoils between them.  The great South, as a whole, was powerless to resist them, for there could be no lasting alliance between Harwich and Brampton and Newcastle and Gosport.  Now their king had come back, and the North Country men were rallying again to his standard.  No wonder that Levi Dodd’s head, poor thing that it was, was safe for a while.

“Organize what you have left, and be quick about it,” said Mr. Flint, when the news had come, and they sat in the library planning a new campaign in the face of this evident defection.  There was no time to cry over spilt milk or reinstated school-teachers.  The messages flew far and wide to the manufacturing towns to range their guilds into line for the railroads.  The seneschal wrote the messages, and sent the summons to the sleek men of the cities, and let it be known that the coffers were full and not too tightly sealed, that the faithful should not lack for the sinews of war.  Mr. Flint found time, too, to write some carefully worded but nevertheless convincing articles for the Newcastle Guardian, very damaging to certain commanders who had proved unfaithful.

“Flint,” said Mr. Worthington, when they had worked far into the night, “if Bass beats us, I’m a crippled man.”

“And if you postpone the fight now that you have begun it?  What then?”

The answer, Mr. Worthington knew, was the same either way.  He did not repeat it.  He went to his bed, but not to sleep for many hours, and when he came down to his breakfast in the morning, he was in no mood to read the letter from Cambridge which Mrs. Holden had put on his plate.  But he did read it, with what anger and bitterness may be imagined.  There was the ultimatum,—­respectful, even affectionate, but firm.  “I know that you will, in all probability, disinherit me as you say, and I tell you honestly that I regret the necessity of quarrelling with you more than I do the money.  I do not pretend to say that I despise money, and I like the things that it buys, but the woman I love is more to me than all that you have.”

Mr. Worthington laid the letter down, and there came irresistibly to his mind something that his wife had said to him before she died, shortly after they had moved into the mansion.  “Dudley, how happy we used to be together before we were rich!” Money had not been everything to Sarah Worthington, either.  But now no tender wave of feeling swept over him as he recalled those words.  He was thinking of what weapon he had to prevent the marriage beyond that which was now useless—­disinheritance.  He would disinherit Bob, and that very day.  He would punish his son to the utmost of his power for marrying the ward of Jethro Bass.  He wondered bitterly, in case a certain event occurred, whether he would have much to alienate.