Dr. Lavendar had gone away uneasy and puzzled. Why didn't she live

with her brother? Family differences no doubt. Curious how families

fall out! "You'd think they'd be glad to hang together," the solitary

old man thought; "and they are not necessarily bad folk who quarrel.

Look at Sam and his boy. Both of 'em good as gold. But it's in the

blood there," he said to himself sighing.

Sam and his son were not bad folk. The boy had nothing bad about him;

nothing worse than an unexpectedness that had provided Old Chester

with smiles for many years. "No; he is not bad; I have seen to

that," his father used to say. "He's hardly been out of my sight

twenty-four hours at a time. And I put my foot down on college

with all its temptations. He's good--if he's nothing else!" And

certainly Samuel Wright was good too. Everybody in Old Chester said

so. He said so himself. "I, my dear Eliza, have nothing with which to

reproach myself," he used to tell his wife ponderously in moments of

conjugal unbending. "I have done my duty. I always do my duty; under

all circumstances. I am doing my duty now by Sam."

This was when he and his son fell out on one point or another, as they

had begun to do as soon as young Sam learned to talk; and all because

the father insisted upon furnishing the boy with his own most

excellent principles and theories, instead of letting the lad

manufacture such things for himself. Now when Sam was twenty-three the

falling-out had become chronic. No doubt it was in the blood, as Dr.

Lavendar said. Some thirty years before, Sam senior, then a slim and

dreamy youth, light-hearted and given to writing verses, had fallen

out with his father, old Benjamin Wright; fallen out so finally that

in all these years since, the two men, father and son, had not spoken

one word to each other. If anybody might have been supposed to know

the cause of that thirty-year-old feud it was Dr. Lavendar. He

certainly saw the beginning of it....

One stormy March evening Samuel Wright, then twenty-four years old,

knocked at the Rectory door; Dr. Lavendar, shielding his lamp from the

wind with one hand, opened it himself.

"Why, Sam, my boy," he said and stopped abruptly. He led the way into

his study and put the lamp down on the table. "Something is the

matter?"

"Yes."

"What is it, Samuel?"




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