"If it wasn't consideration for you, at least it was for some one who should be important to you. As it is, your little girl isn't growing up under the shadow of a sensational divorce record."
The pale blue eyes of the Englishman softened abruptly, and the lips under the short-clipped moustache changed from their stiffness to the curvature of something like a smile. Into his expression came a lurking, half-shy ghost of winsomeness. "Yes, yes," he muttered, "the kiddie. God bless her little heart!"
After a moment, though, he drew back his shoulders with a jerk and spoke again in a harsher timbre.
"Anne has been fair enough with me about the child, though I'm bound to say I've been jolly well made to understand that it was only a chivalrous and undeserved sort of generosity. Well, the kiddie's almost twelve now, and before long she'll be a belle, too--poor, but related to all the first families."
Masters paused, and when he went on again it was still with the air of a repressed chafing of spirit.
"I dare say her mother will see to it that she doesn't repeat the mistake of the previous generation--marrying a man with only a splendid expectancy. Her heart will be schooled to demand the assured thing. That pointing with pride--a gesture which you Kentuckians so enjoy--well, with my little girl, it will all be done toward the distaff branch. There won't be much said about the wastrel father."
"Perhaps," suggested the other, "you are a little less than just."
"I dare say. She'll be a heart-breaker before long now--and listen, man"--Masters came a step nearer--"don't make any mistake about me either. When she's here, the bottle goes under lock and key. I play the game where she's concerned."
Colonel Wallifarro nodded slowly. "I know that, Larry," he hastily answered. "I know that. If the breach hadn't widened too far, I'd go as far as a man could to bring your family together again under one roof-tree."
"That's no use, of course," admitted Masters with a dead intonation. "Only remember that down here where I'm chained to my little job, life ain't so damned gay and sunny at best--and don't begrudge me my liquor."
During those following months, when Asa Gregory lay in jail, first in Frankfort, then in Louisville, as a prisoner of state, who had been denied bail, the boy back in the laurel-mantled hills smouldered with passionate resentment for what he believed to be a monstrous injustice. In his quest of education he sought refuge from the bitter brooding that had begun to mar his young features with its stamp of sullenness. Asa had killed men before, but it had been in that feud warfare which was sanctioned by his own conscience. Now he stood charged with a murder done for hire, the mercenary taking off of a man for whom he had no enmity save that of the abstract and political. Upon his kinsman's innocence the boy would have staked his life, and yet he must look helplessly on and see him thrown to the lions of public indignation.