Whatever the cause, certain it was that the change in the boy's view of life was as instantaneous as it was radical.
And this was quite possible when his blood is considered.

There had been, it is true, dominating tyrants way back in his ancestry, as well as spend-thrifts, drunkards, roysterers, and gamesters, but so far as the records showed there had never been a coward.

That old fellow De Ruyter, whose portrait hung at Moorlands and who might have been his father, so great was the resemblance, had, so to speak, held a shovel in one hand and a sword in the other in the days when he helped drown out his own and his neighbors' estates to keep the haughty don from gobbling up his country.

One had but to look into Harry's face to be convinced that he too would have followed in his footsteps had he lived in that ancestor's time.
It was when the boy, smarting under his father's insult, was passing under the blossoms of a wide-spreading magnolia, trying to get a glimpse of Kate's face, if by any chance she should be at her window, that this grain of gray matter, or lively red corpuscle--or whatever it might have been--forced itself through.

The breaking away was slow--little by little--as an underground tunnel seeks an opening--but the light increased with every thought-stroke, its blinding intensity becoming so fierce at last that he came to a halt, his eyes on the ground, his whole body tense, his mind in a whirl.
Suddenly his brain acted.
To sit down and snivel would do no good; to curse his father would be useless and wicked; to force himself on Kate sheer madness.
But--BUT--BUT--he was twenty-two!--in perfect health and not ashamed to look any man in the face.