no matter
how it comes out. But--it did take courage to make that will!"

"Well, good day, judge," Arthur was saying, to end both their reveries.
"I must," he laughed curtly, "'get a move on.'"

"Good day, and God bless you, boy," said the old man, with a hearty
earnestness that, for the moment, made Arthur's eyes less hard. "Take
your time, settling on what to do. Don't be in a hurry."

"On the contrary," said Arthur. "I'm going to make up my mind at once.
Nothing stales so quickly as a good resolution."

CHAPTER XIV

SIMEON

A crisis does not create character, but is simply its test. The young man
who entered the gates of No. 64 Jefferson Street at five that afternoon
was in all respects he who left them at a quarter before four, though he
seemed very different to himself. He went direct to his own room and did
not descend until the supper bell sounded--that funny little old jangling
bell he and Del had striven to have abolished in the interests of
fashionable progress, until they learned that in many of the best English
houses it is a custom as sacredly part of the ghostly British
Constitution as the bathless bath of the basin, as the jokeless joke of
the pun, as the entertainment that entertains not, as the ruler that
rules not and the freedom that frees not. When he appeared in the
dining-room door, his mother and Del were already seated. His mother, her
white face a shade whiter, said: "I expect you'd better sit--there." She
neither pointed nor looked, but they understood that she meant Hiram's
place. It was her formal announcement of her forgiveness and of her
recognition of the new head of the family. With that in his face that
gave Adelaide a sense of the ending of a tension within her, he seated
himself where his father had always sat.

It was a silent supper, each one absorbed in thoughts which could not
have been uttered, no one able to find any subject that would not make
overwhelming the awful sense of the one that was not there and never
again would be. Mrs. Ranger spoke once. "How did you find Janet?" she
said to Arthur.

His face grew red, with gray underneath. After a pause he answered:
"Very well." Another pause, then: "Our engagement is broken off."

Mrs. Ranger winced and shrank. She knew how her question and the effort
of that answer must have hurt the boy; but she did not make matters worse
with words. Indeed, she would have been unable to say anything, for
sympathy would have b