of Contents
CHAPTER IX
CHAPTER XVIII
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
"'I can always find a little time for bankers. I never kept one waiting yet and I won't begin now.'"
"The girl was already reading Wilbur's palm, disclosing to him that he had a deep vein of cruelty in his nature."
"The malign eye was worn so proudly that the wearer bubbled vaingloriously of how he had achieved the stigma."
CHAPTER I
An establishment in Newbern Center, trading under the name of the Foto Art Shop, once displayed in its window a likeness of the twin sons of Dave Cowan. Side by side, on a lavishly fringed plush couch, they confronted the camera with differing aspects. One sat forward with a decently, even blandly, composed visage, nor had he meddled with his curls. His mate sat back, scowling, and fought the camera to the bitter end. His curls, at the last moment, had been mussed by a raging hand.
This was in the days of an earlier Newbern, when the twins were four and Winona Penniman began to be their troubled mentor—troubled lest they should not grow up to be refined persons; a day when Dave Cowan, the widely travelled printer, could rightly deride its citizenry as small-towners; a day when the Whipples were Newbern's sole noblesse and the Cowan twins not yet torn asunder.
The little town lay along a small but potent river that turned a few factory wheels with its eager current, and it drew sustenance from the hill farms that encircled it for miles about. You had to take a dingy way train up to the main line if you were going the long day's journey to New York, so that the Center of the name was often construed facetiously by outlanders.
Now Newbern Center is modern, and grows callous. Only the other day a wandering biplane circled the second nine of its new golf course, and of the four players on the tenth green but one paid it the tribute of an upward