said impatiently, with that nervous avoidance of the person he
loved best. "I'll be back in time to carry her to bed, but I've
got to take a half-hour off and look in on Tom Spade." "She
really ought to go to bed before sundown," responded Cynthia,
"but nothing under heaven will persuade her to do so. It's her
wonderful will that keeps her alive, just as it keeps her sitting
bolt upright in that old chair. I don't believe there's another
woman on earth who could have done it for more than twenty
years." Taking down his hat from a big nail in the wall,
Christopher stood for a moment abstractedly fingering the brim.
"Well, I'll be back shortly," he said at last, and went out
hurriedly into the darkness. At the instant he could not tell why
he had so suddenly decided to follow Will Fletcher to the store,
but, as usual, when the impulse came to him he proceeded to act
promptly as it directed. Strangely enough, the boy was the one
human being whom he felt no inclination to avoid, and the least
oppressive moments that he knew were the reckless ones they spent
together. While his daily companion was mentally and morally upon
a lower plane than his own, the association was not without a
balm for his wounded pride; and the knowledge that it was still
possible to assume superiority to Fletcher's heir was, so far as
he himself admitted, the one consolation that his life contained.
As for his feeling toward Will Fletcher as an individual, it was
the outcome of so curious a mixture of attraction and repulsion
that he had long ceased from any attempt to define it as pure
emotion. For the last four years the boy had been, as Tom Spade
put it, "the very shadow on the man's footsteps," and yet at the
end of that time it was almost impossible for Christopher to
acknowledge either his liking or his hatred. He had suffered him
for his own end, that was all, and he had come at last almost to