it was, his machinelike, matter-of-fact training and his own self-
conscious anxiety not to be different from the average good
sportsman had made him conform admirably to type. He was a fine
specimen of the eager, naive, quick-witted, clean-minded young
American, free from "side," devoid of mannerisms, determined to make
the utmost of life and its possibilities.

It is true that when death seized upon the man who was brother and
pal as well as father to Martin, all the stucco beneath which he had
so carefully hidden his spiritual and imaginative side cracked and
broke. Under the indescribable shock of what seemed to him to be
wanton and meaningless cruelty, the boy gave way to a grief that was
angry and agonized by turns. He had left a fit, high-spirited father
to drive to a golf shop to buy a new mashie, returned to take him
out to Sleepy Hollow for a couple of rounds--and found him stretched
out on the floor of the library, dead. Was it any wonder that he
tortured himself with unanswerable questions, sat for hours in the
dark trying with the most pitiful futility to fathom the riddle of
life, or that he wandered aimlessly about the place, which was
stamped with his father's fine and kindly personality,--like a stick
suddenly swept out of the current of the main stream into a tideless
backwater, untouched by the sun? And when finally, still deaf to the
call of spring, his father's message of courage, "We count it death
to falter, not to die," rang out and straightened him up and set him
on the rails of action once again, it was not quite the same Martin
Gray who uttered the silent cry for companionship that found an
answer in Joan's lonely and rebellious heart. Sorrow had
strengthened him. Out of the silent manliness of grief he went out
again on the great main road with a wistful desire to love and be
loved, to find some one with whom to link an arm in an empty world