added that she had always lived in the East; "but I find it very
pleasant here," she ended vaguely.

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