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This was not the gay, the brilliant, the fascinating bon viveur who had been the life of society from Warchester to Bucephalo, from Pentica to New York. Ah! what were the mystic terrors of the night, what the oppressive surroundings of this charnel-house of Nature, to the awful spectacle of this unmanned mind, this delirious echo of past guilt, past cowardice, past shame?

His legal practice, rather than the wide acres of his domain, had supported a hospitality famous from Bucephalo to Washington. But with prudent management the family had abundance, and, as Jack often said, he was a fortune in himself. When the time came he would revive the splendors his father loved to associate with the home of his ancestors. "But where are we to get this splendor now, Jack?"

Save in the bustling business segment, abutting the four corners, where the old United States road bore off westward to Bucephalo and the lakes, the few score houses were set far back from the highway in a wilderness of shrubbery, secluded by hedges and shaded by an almost primeval growth of elms or maples. The whole hamlet might be mistaken for a lordly park or an old-fashioned German Spa.

It was the fireside history of the whole Caribee Valley that the rich contractor had encouraged the ruined gentleman in the excesses that ended the profligate's career; that the two men had staked large sums at play in Bucephalo, and that inability to meet his losses to Boone had caused Dick Perley's flight.