“Very good, very good indeed,” responded Mr. Shackford, with a smile in which his eyes took no share, it was merely a momentary curling up of crisp wrinkles.  He did not usually smile at other people’s pleasantries; but when a person worth three or four hundred thousand dollars condescends to indulge a joke, it is not to be passed over like that of a poor relation.  “Yes, yes,” muttered the old man, as he stooped and picked up a pin, adding it to a row of similarly acquired pins which gave the left lapel of his threadbare coat the appearance of a miniature harp, “I shall make a lawyer of him.”

It had long been settled in Mr. Shackford’s mind that Richard, so soon as he had finished his studies, should enter the law-office of Blandmann & Sharpe, a firm of rather sinister reputation in South Millville.

At fourteen Richard’s eyes had begun to open on the situation; at fifteen he saw very clearly; and one day, without much preliminary formulating of his plan, he decided on a step that had been taken by every male Shackford as far back as tradition preserves the record of his family.

A friendship had sprung up between Richard and one William Durgin, a school-mate.  This Durgin was a sallow, brooding boy, a year older than himself.  The two lads were antipodal in disposition, intelligence, and social standing; for though Richard went poorly clad, the reflection of his cousin’s wealth gilded him.  Durgin was the son of a washerwoman.  An intimacy between the two would perhaps have been unlikely but for one fact:  it was Durgin’s mother who had given little Dick a shelter at the period of his parents’ death.  Though the circumstance did not lie within the pale of Richard’s personal memory, he acknowledged the debt by rather insisting on Durgin’s friendship.  It was William Durgin, therefore, who was elected to wait upon Mr. Shackford on a certain morning which found that gentleman greatly disturbed by an unprecedented occurrence,—­Richard had slept out of the house the previous night.

Durgin was the bearer of a note which Mr. Shackford received in some astonishment, and read deliberately, blinking with weak eyes behind the glasses.  Having torn off the blank page and laid it aside for his own more economical correspondence (the rascal had actually used a whole sheet to write ten words!), Mr. Shackford turned, and with the absorbed air of a naturalist studying some abnormal bug gazed over the steel bow of his spectacles at Durgin.

“Skit!”

Durgin hastily retreated.

“There’s a poor lawyer saved,” muttered the old man, taking down his overcoat from a peg behind the door, and snapping off a shred of lint on the collar with his lean forefinger.  Then his face relaxed, and an odd grin diffused a kind of wintry glow over it.

Richard had run away to sea.

VI