ghing in
return, and so it had gone at that.

At first Harry had dreaded meeting his father's and his uncle's friends,
most of whom, he fancied, might be disposed to judge him too harshly.
But St. George had shut his ears to every objection, insisting that the
club was a place where a man could be as independent as he pleased, and
that as his guest he would be entitled to every consideration.

The boy need not have been worried. Almost every member, young and
old, showed by his manner or some little act of attention that their
sympathies were with the exile. While a few strait-laced old Quakers
maintained that it was criminal to blaze away at your fellow-man with
the firm intention of blowing the top of his head off, and that
Harry should have been hung had Willits died, there were others more
discerning--and they were largely in the majority--who stood up for the
lad however much they deplored the cause of his banishment. Harry, they
argued, had in his brief career been an unbroken colt, and more or less
dissipated, but he at least had not shown the white feather. Boy as he
was, he had faced his antagonist with the coolness of a duellist of a
score of encounters, letting Willits fire straight at him without so
much as the wink of an eyelid; and, when it was all over, had been man
enough to nurse his victim back to consciousness. Moreover--and this
counted much in his favor--he had refused to quarrel with his irate
father, or even answer him. "Behaved himself like a thoroughbred, as he
is," Dorsey Sullivan, a famous duellist, had remarked in recounting the
occurrence to a non-witness. "And I must say, sir, that Talbot
served him a scurvy trick, and I don't care who hears me say it."
Furthermore--and this made a great impression--that rather than
humiliate himself, the boy had abandoned the comforts of his palatial
home at Moorlands and was at the moment occupying a small, second-story
back room (all, it is true, Gentleman George could give him), where he
was to be found any hour of the day or night that his uncle needed him
in attendance upon that prince of good fellows.

One other thing that counted in his favor, and this was conclusive with
the Quakers--and the club held not a few--was that no drop of liquor
of any kind had passed the boy's lips since the eventful night when St.
George prepared the way for their first reconciliation.

Summed up, then, whatever Harry had been in the past, the verdict at
the present