"Slight as is the difference between your ages, you are but an
inexperienced girl, as the world knows experience, and William is a
man--and a man, I am sorry to say, who is no fit associate for a woman
like you."

Surprised and perplexed the girl felt her anger rise against this man.
Instinctively she rallied to Bill's defense:

"He is not bad at heart!" she said resentfully.

"What worse can you say?" returned Carmody with a harsh laugh. "Of all
expressions coined to damn a man with faint praise, there is only one
more effective: 'He means well.'"

Ethel was thoroughly angry now. She drew herself up, and her blue eyes
darkened as she faced him.

"That is not so!" she cried. "Bill is _not_ bad at heart! And he _does_
mean well! Whose fault is it that he has grown up reckless and wild?
Who is to blame? What chance has he had? What have you done for him?
Filled his pockets with money and packed him off to school. Filled his
pockets with money and sent him to college. Filled his pockets with
money and shipped him abroad.

"Then, without consulting his taste or desire, you peremptorily thrust
him into a business which he loathes--on an office boy's salary and an
allowance out of all proportion to his requirements.

"You say he has never taken you into his confidence. Have you ever
invited that confidence? Have you ever sought his companionship--even
his acquaintance?"

The man was astonished at her vehemence. Uncomfortably he found himself
forced to the defensive.

"He had his chance. I placed him in the bank that he might learn the
business as I learned it. If he had had the right stuff in him he would
have made good. As it was, he attended to his duties in the most
perfunctory and superficial manner. He showed not the slightest
interest in the business. In fact, his position could have been ably
filled by the veriest gutter-snipe. And _he_ is the man who one day, in
all probability, would have come into control of the Carmody millions!
And he would have scattered them in a riot of dissipation the length
and breadth of Broadway.

"But I have forestalled him. He is foot-loose--gone, God knows where,
to follow the fortune of adventure, perhaps, at the ends of the earth.
For in him, transmitted in some unaccountable manner through the blood
of the gentlest, sweetest little woman who ever warmed a heart, is the
restless spirit of the roistering, fighting McKims."

"Is it the boy's fault that he is a McKim?" ret