Both father and son were crying now, for emotion especially in Wales is catching.  But the father laughed through his tears; and incoherently thanked God for the return of the prodigal—­a fine upstanding lad—­whole and sound.  “No taint about you, Davy, I’ll be bound.  Why your voice alone shows you’ve been a clean liver.  It’s music in my ears, and if I could see as well as I can hear I’d wager you’re a handsome lad and have lost much of your foolishness.  Davy, lad” (lowering his voice) “you’ve no cause to be anxious about Jenny.  She—­she—­had a boy, but we got her married to a miner—­I made it right with him.  She has another child now, but they’re being brought up together.  We won’t refer to it again.  She lives twenty miles from here, at Gower—­and ... and ... there’s an end of it....

“Now you won’t run away back to London till you’re obliged?  Where’s your luggage?  At Pontyffynon?”

“No,” said David, a little non-plussed at evidences of his dissolute past and this unexpected fatherhood assumed on his account.  “I haven’t more luggage than what is contained in my bicycle bag.  But don’t let that concern you.  I’ll go over to Swansea one day or some nearer town and buy what may be necessary, and I’ll stay with you all my holidays, tell you all my plans, and even after I go back to London I’ll always come down here when I can get away.  For the present I’m going simply to enjoy myself for the first time in my life.  The last four years we’ll look on as a horrid dream.  What a paradise you live in.”  His eye ranged over the two-storeyed, soundly-built stone house facing south, with mountains behind and the western sun throwing shafts of warm yellow green over the lawn and the flower beds; over clumps of elms in the middle, southern distance, that might have been planted by the Romans (who loved this part of Wales).  Bees, butterflies and swallows were in the air; the distant lowing of kine, the scent of the roses, the clatter in the kitchen where Nannie aided by another female servant was preparing supper, even the barking of a watch dog; aware that something unusual was going on, completed the impression of the blissful countryside.  “What a paradise you live in!  How could I have left it?”

“Ay, dear lad; I doubt not it looks strange and new to you since you’ve been in South Africa and London.  But it’ll soon seem homelike enough.  And now you’ll like to see your room, and have a wash before supper.  Tom, the gardener, shall take in your bicycle and give it a rub over.  I’ve still got the old one here in the coach-house which you left behind.  Tom’s new, since you left.  He’s not so clever with the bees as your old friend Evan was, but he’s a steadier lad.  I fear me Evan led you into some of your scrapes.  The fault was partly mine.  I shouldn’t have let you run wild so much, but I was so wrapped up in my studies—­Well, well!”

David was careful to play his part sufficiently to say when shown into his old bedroom, “Just the same, father; scarcely a bit altered—­but isn’t the bed moved—­to another place?”