in upon him. And
the eyes of the Dead Man were boring to his very soul. Something very
like Conscience was stirring within him. He laid the photograph face
downward on the table and he bent his head forward upon his hands.

The young man was not a melodrama villain. He was not even a scoundrel,
in the broad sense of the term. Weak, lazy, pleasure loving, he was what
Peter Grimm had all unconsciously made him. As a dilettante, a man of
leisure, or even comfortably engaged in some easy, congenial life work
and with pleasant home surroundings, he would probably have developed
few undesirable traits.

From boyhood he had been under the influence and orders of Peter Grimm.
To be under Peter Grimm's supervision entailed one of three courses,
according to the character of the person concerned: either to yield
gracefully and gratefully to the old man's kindly but iron domination
and find therein love and protection,--as had Kathrien; or to use the
right of personal thought and individuality, and therefore to clash
forever with Peter,--as had James Hartmann; or to seem for policy's sake
to bend, while really living one's own life;--as had Frederik.

Peter Grimm was the slave and apostle of Order, Work, and Method.
Frederik loved ease, luxury, artistic surroundings. Yet he was too wise
to antagonise his uncle, who had the power to leave him one day the
master of all these pleasant things he craved. So he had adapted himself
outwardly to a path he loathed. And, by the wayside, he had secretly
sought such pleasures as his nature craved.

Anne Marie had chanced to be by the wayside.

What had followed was rendered tragic chiefly by Anne Marie's innate
goodness and by Peter Grimm's fierce morality.

Frederik dared not risk the loss of a future fortune by admitting his
fault or by marrying the woman for whom, at the time, he had really
cared. In a shiftless way and with straitly limited income, he had done
what he could do for her. The sacrifices these helps had entailed and
the constant fear of exposure and of consequent disinheritance had in
time made the thought of Anne Marie a horror to him.

When he had gone, at Peter Grimm's command, to Leyden and Heidelberg to
study botany, Frederik had hoped to close the unsavoury incident for all
time.

On his return he had found Willem installed at the Grimm home, a living,
ever-present menace and reminder to him. And, despite a soft heart and
a normally decent nature, Frederik had,