Then again the flag of his pride would be raised aloft so that he and all the people could see, and the old hard look would once more settle in his face, the lips straighten and the thin fingers tighten.

No--NO! No assassins for him--no vulgar brawlers--and it was at best a vulgar brawl--and this too within the confines of Moorlands, where, for five generations, only gentlemen had been bred! And yet, product as he was of a regime that worshipped no ideals but its own; hide-bound by the traditions of his ancestry; holding in secret disdain men and women who could not boast of equal wealth and lineage; dictatorial, uncontradictable; stickler for obsolete forms and ceremonies--there still lay deep under the crust of his pride the heart of a father, and, by his standards, the soul of a gentleman.
What this renegade son of his thought of it all; this disturber of his father's sleeping and waking hours, was far easier to discover.

Dazed as Harry had been at the parental verdict and heart-broken as he still was over the dire results, he could not, though he tried, see what else he could have done.

His father, he argued to himself, had shot and killed a man when he was but little older than himself, and for an offence much less grave than Willits's insult to Kate: he had frequently boasted of it, showing him the big brass button that had deflected the bullet and saved his life.

So had his Uncle George, five years before--not a dead man that time, but a lame one--who was still limping around the club and very good friends the two, so far as he knew.