pose, to finish me with this weight of family majesty. Of course, if dad had been home she would not have done it. Well, we sat down to dinner, but if an avalanche is going to fall on me I’m not going to sit idle and watch it coming down. So I asked mother what the matter was. She said I would know presently. I said I’d know then, or leave the table and go to eat with the servants. My old grandfather held up a hand in the way he had always done to annihilate opinion. Something happened to me. I shouted at him to mind his own business, that as far as I was concerned he was dead. I wish you could have seen the faces. I’m sure they thought the moon and stars were coming right through the ceiling. If I’d had a dozen hands with pistols in each pointing at their heads they could not have looked more staggered. They were a ridiculous spectacle, and I lost my temper and told them what I thought of them. I made mother tell me about the letter and the cigarettes, and then I let them have it—all the bottled-up rage of my youth. Of course I was abominable. I gloried in the mess I was making of their nerves. Nothing short of physical force could have stopped me, and they didn’t know what to do with me. Mother took hysterics and Aunt Maud wept. When I was done I was sick too. Then I stalked out and left them.
“I went down to the rocks and the boathouse, and presently Bob came; I’d told him something was up. And I told him I was going to run away and settle the thing. Well, he’d had a row too. The Bishop had found out he was reading Ingersoll. So we decided we’d both go. I guess I egged Bob on. I had three pounds in my money box and he had five. We got out that night about midnight. I was thrilled with the idea and quite reckless. I had a beauty of a little boat that we could sail or row, and he had a tent, and we sneaked out no end of things, my man-
