assistance, but I must ask you not to pursue my daughter further. If you seek more than gratitude for what you have done, I shall be glad to send you a check. Under no circumstances, however, are you to address another letter to my daughter. Any such I shall be obliged to open and, if you persist in making her the butt of your unwelcome attentions, I shall be obliged to pay a visit to the police court myself.
very truly yours,
Beckford Blake.
What an insult! The hideous mortification of receiving such a letter burned Harold's cheeks with shame. And poor Alice. How must she feel? What had her father done to her? Then he suddenly remembered that he had been on the verge of telling the whole story to Paul. If he had seen Paul last evening he certainly would have told him, and Paul would have laughed. Paul surely would laugh at this story; so would Drains. With a sort of furtive intuition he began to believe that no women were innocent in the eyes of Paul and Drains. Harold felt more than ever a martyr. His life, which, it seemed, began with a mistake on the day he was born, would, he was convinced, never shape itself. All his existence, apparently, would continue to be one long mistake. Again, quite spontaneously, the idea recurred to him that he hated his father for, however unconsciously, shaping it for him. It wasn't, he began to realize, his college years which had proved his present undoing, but
