Page:Keeping the Peace.pdf/104

 "He's all right."

"Don't ever forget," said John with sudden vehemence, "that father is the best father that anybody ever had."

John was able to remain at home for nearly a week. And all Westchester with the exception of a few families who had begun to imagine themselves people of fashion called to see how the minister's black sheep had turned out.

Westchester discovered that the black sheep had turned into an honest, straightforward and widely traveled young man. He had found time to read, and sea life, instead of roughening him, had made him very quiet in speech and fastidiously neat and clean.

But Dear Mother insisted on mourning over him. She felt that he had sunk pretty low in this world for a minister's son and that he would sink still lower in the next. A fine reverence for the created world and all that is beyond the reach of man's understanding, and conduct which closely resembled that outlined in the Golden Rule, could not pass for Christianity in Mrs. Eaton's eyes, and when one morning at breakfast John told Edward that there didn't seem to be very much doubt that man had descended from some kind of an ape, and that the ape in turn had descended from some