rton--the
wilder blood at the university found its field. Young Ellwell shirked
his chance; while his mates were enlisting and leaving college, he
slunk away in little sprees, pleading weak health. Mark Ellwell,
shamed and mortified, would have horsewhipped his son into the ranks,
but the mother defended the weakling.

One day young Ellwell announced his marriage to a Salem girl whom he
had met the week before. His father gave him a house; as he chose to
be a broker, his father started him with his own credit. A few years
later, when the war was over and John Ellwell was succeeding in the
general tide of success, established with a family and three young
children, all seemed well. Now the Four Corners was rarely visited.
The verandas broke down; grass and hardy roses grew into the cracks
where the clap-boards had started. The Ellwells, father and son, were
fashionable people; the family had developed.

Early in the seventies there came rumors of young Ellwell's disgrace
in the Tremont Club. He was detected cheating at play, and left the
club, of which Mark Ellwell was vice-president. John Ellwell was a
large, florid man, with the fine features of the good New England
pastor, a slightly Roman nose, and a gouty tendency in his walk. He
was the flourishing broker, of the kind who worked on nerve, who was
never sober after three in the afternoon, and having begun to drink at
ten was uncertain after twelve. He knew a side of business life that
his father had never seen; he associated with men whom the stiff Mark
would have disdained to recognize. But his reputation for cleverness
carried him on in spite of the club affair until....

One day, after a spree, he went on the Board wild and flurried. What
he did he could never remember, but when the settlement for that day's
transactions was made he was ruined. The Board gave him a week to find
the necessary funds and pay his debts. His father settled the affair,
opened the Four Corners for his family, sold his own house on Beacon
Street, and taking his two daughters, who had never married, sailed
for Europe. That was the end of the Ellwells in old Boston. Mark
Ellwell never came back.

"The old man is done with me." That had been John's comment to his
wife. And well might Mark Ellwell be done with him; there was not much
left for another clearing up. There were the Four Corners, and his
seat in the Board, and then--beggary. So in the third generation the
Ellwells establishe