Raymond waited back home for Albert, and Albert did not return. We gathered from a newspaper published near the shores of Narragansett Bay that Albert, as his mother's triumphant possession, was now being shown at another resort—and a more important one, judging by his grandmother's social affiliations; also, that Mrs. McComas, who had not done any too well on the Jersey shore, was appearing at the new plage—doubtless as the just and sympathetic friend (of social prominence in her own community) who had stood stanch through difficulties unjustly endured. Her husband himself had, of course, returned to the West.

His business called him, even in mid-summer. He had his bank, but he had more than his bank. There are banks and banks—you can divide them up in several different ways. There are, of course,—as we have seen,—the banks that fail, and the banks that do not. And there are the banks that exist as an end in themselves, and the banks that exist as a means to other things: those that function along methodically, without taking on any extraneous features; and those that serve as a nucleus for accumulating interests, as a fulcrum to move affairs through a wide and varied range. Of this kind was McComas's. Johnny was not the man to stand still and let routine take its way—not the man to mark time, even through the vacation season. Nor could he have done so even if he had wanted to. But all I need say, just here, is that he came back home again after three or four days, all told, and that any threatened embarassment was nullified, or at least postponed.

Raymond heard in silence my account of the doings on the Atlantic shore: only a wry twist of the mouth and a flare of the nostrils. But as the weeks went on, and still no Albert, his anger became articulate.

"I shall teach her that an agreement is an agreement," he declared. "She will never try this again."

Albert finally came home, three weeks late; his mother brought him herself. The governess transferred him from the hands of one parent to those of the other; and Raymond had asked my presence for that moment, as a sort of moral urge.

"Who knows," he asked, "what delay she may try for next?"

He gave one look at the picturesque, if not fantastic, toggery of his restored child.

"Did you ever see anything like that?" he said scornfully; and I foresaw a sacrificial bonfire—or its equivalent—with Albert presently clothed in sane autumn garb.

Albert was followed, within a week, by a letter from his mother. This was diffuse and circumlocutory, like the first. But its general sense was clear. If Raymond was thinking of putting Albert into a boarding-school....

"There she goes again!" exclaimed the exacerbated father. "A matter with which, by hard-and-fast agreement, she has absolutely nothing to do!"

However, if he was thinking of a boarding-school....

"A child barely seven!" cried Raymond. "Why, half of them will hardly consider one of eight!"

Still, if he was thinking—well, Mrs. McComas knew of a charming one, an old-established one, one in which the head-master's wife, a delightful, motherly soul.... And it was just within the Wisconsin line, not forty miles from town....

"I see her camping at the gate!" said Raymond bitterly. "Or taking a house there. Or spending months at a hotel near by. Constantly fussing round the edge of things. Running in on every visitors' day...."

"Likely enough," I said. "A mother's a mother."

"Well," rejoined Raymond, "the boy shall go to school—in another year. But the school will be a good deal more than forty miles from here—no continual week-end trips. And it will not be in a town that has an endurable hotel—that ought to be easy to arrange, in this part of the world. No, it won't be near any town at all. I don't suppose she would take a—tent?" he queried sardonically.

"To some mothers the blue tent of heaven would alone suffice," I said—perhaps unworthily.

"Rubbish!" he ejaculated; and I felt that a word fitly spoken—or perhaps unfittingly—was rebuked.