ers; he was
a speaker of power and grace; and he had a clear, strong head for
business. He was also a lawyer, and was junior attorney to his father's
great business. It was because he had the real business gift, not
because he had a brilliant and scholarly mind, that his father had taken
him into his concerns, and was the more unforgiving when he gave way to
temptation. Otherwise, he would have pensioned Jim off, and dismissed
him from his mind as a useless, insignificant person; for Horace,
Anacreon, and philosophy and history were to him the recreations of the
feeble-minded. He had set his heart on Jim, and what Jim could do and
would do by and by in the vast financial concerns he controlled, when
he was ready to slip out and down; but Jim had disappointed him beyond
calculation.

In the early days of their association Jim had left his post and taken
to drink at critical moments in their operations. At first, high words
had been spoken; then there came the strife of two dissimilar natures,
and both were headstrong, and each proud and unrelenting in his own way.
Then, at last, had come the separation, irrevocable and painful; and Jim
had flung out into the world, a drunkard, who, sober for a fortnight or
a month, or three months, would afterward go off on a spree, in which he
quoted Sappho and Horace in taverns, and sang bacchanalian songs with a
voice meant for the stage--a heritage from an ancestor who had sung upon
the English stage a hundred years before. Even in his cups, even after
his darling vice had submerged him, Jim Templeton was a man marked out
from his fellows, distinguished and very handsome. Society, however, had
ceased to recognise him for a long time, and he did not seek it. For two
or three years he practised law now and then. He took cases, preferably
criminal cases, for which very often he got no pay; but that, too,
ceased at last. Now, in his quiet, sober intervals he read omnivorously,
and worked out problems in physics for which he had a taste, until the
old appetite surged over him again. Then his spirits rose, and he was
the old brilliant talker, the joyous galliard until, in due time, he
became silently and lethargically drunk.

In one of his sober intervals he had met Sally Seabrook in the street.
It was the first time in four years, for he had avoided her, and though
she had written to him once or twice, he had never answered her--shame
was in his heart. Yet all the time the old song was i