“It wasn’t anything you said,” she answered simply.  “I found out you were different from what I thought, that is all.”

“Then you must have thought something!” he laughed aloud.

“I was afraid at first that you might have a bad influence over Archibald.”

“Oh, the kid!” His mirth was as irrepressible as his energy.

“You see I have to be very careful,” she went on gently.  “I want to do my best by him.”

At this he turned on her with sudden earnestness.  “You can’t do your best by being too careful—­take my word for it.  If you want him to be a man, don’t begin by making a mollycoddle of him.  Let him rough it a bit, or it will be twice as hard for him when he grows up.”

“But I do—­I do.  I am sending him away from me.  Isn’t that right?”

“You bet it is.  Let him learn his own strength.  I’ve lived among men ever since I was born, and I tell you, nine times out of ten, the boy who is tied to his mother’s apron-strings, loses his grip when he is turned out into the world.  At the first knock-down he goes under.”

Instinctively she flinched.  If only he wouldn’t!

“After he leaves school of course he will go to the university,” she said.

“That’s right,” he agreed emphatically, and pursued a little wistfully:  “Now, that’s what I was cheated out of, and there’ve been times when I’d have given my right arm to have been through college instead of having to keep my mouth shut and then run home and look up the meaning of things in an encyclopædia.  It’s a handicap, not knowing things.  Nobody who hasn’t had to get along in spite of, it knows what a darned handicap it is!”

“But you read, don’t you?”

“Not much.  Never had time to form the habit.  But I’ve read Shakespeare—­at least I’ve read Julius Cæsar six times,” he explained.  “I had it in the desert once where there wasn’t a newspaper for two months.  And I’ve read the Kings, too—­most of ’em.”

“But not Hamlet?” She was smiling as she looked from him into the street.

He shook his head with a laugh.  “Too much meandering in that.  I don’t like talk unless it is straight.”

Though he was upon the most distant terms of acquaintance with the English language, it occurred to her that he probably possessed a knowledge of men and things which no university training could have given him.

“It is wonderful,” she remarked, touched to sympathy by his confession, “that you should have succeeded.”

“Oh, any man could have done it—­any man, that is, who loved a fight as much as I do.  It was half luck and half bulldog grip, I suppose.  When I once get my grip on a thing, I’ll hold on no matter what happens.  There ain’t the power this side of Kingdom Come that could make me let go if I don’t want to.”

She thought of his wife, of his losing fight against the craving for morphine, and she replied very gently:  “If you hadn’t been a good fighter, I suppose you would have been beaten long ago.”