“O my son Absalom!” he cried, “my son, my son, Absalom!  Would God I had died for thee, O Absalom, my son, my son!”

He remembered also what his own married life had been; he always trusted that Robert would have a wife who would be a help to him, and he felt sure that this girl Shipton, with her pretty rosy face and blue eyes, had no brains.  To think that his boy should repeat the same inexplicable blunder, that she was silly, that he would never hear from her lips a serious word!  What will she be if trouble comes on him?  What will she be when a twelvemonth has passed?  What will he be when he sits by his fireside in long winter evenings, alone with her, and finds she cannot interest him for a moment?

Worse still, she was not a child of God.  He did not know that she ever sought the Lord.  She went to church once a day and read her prayers, and that was all.  She was not one of the chosen, and she might corrupt him, and he might fall away, and so commit the sin against the Holy Ghost “O Lord, O Lord!” he prayed one evening, in rebellion rather than as a suppliant, “what has Thy servant done that Thou shouldst visit him thus?” He almost mutinied, but he was afraid, and his religion came to his rescue, and he broke down into “And yet not my will, the will of the meanest of sinners, but Thine be done.”  He made up his mind once or twice that he would solemnly remonstrate with his son, but his aspect was such whenever the subject was approached, even from a distance, that he dared not.  Hitherto the boy had joyfully submitted to be counselled, and had sought his father’s direction, but now, if the conversation turned in a certain direction, a kind of savage reserve was visible, at which Michael was frightened.  He was a man of exceedingly slow conception.  For days and days he would often debate within himself, and at the end the fog was as thick as ever.  He complained once to David Trevenna of this failing, and David gave him a useful piece of practical advice.

“Leave it alone, master.  The more you thinks, the more you muddle yourself.  Leave it alone, and when it comes into your head, try to get rid of it.  In a week or so the thing will do more for itself than you’ll do for it.  It will settle, like new beer, and come clear enough.  That’s what my missus has often said to me, and I know she’s right.”

But, do what he might, Michael could not in this instance leave it alone.  He cast about incessantly for some device by which he could break his son loose from the girl.  It was all in vain.  She might be frivolous, but there was nothing against her character, and he saw evident signs that if he attempted any exercise of authority he would lose Robert altogether in open revolt.  For Robert, it must be remembered, had never scattered his strength in loose love.  He had grown up to manhood in perfect innocence, and all his stored-up passion spent itself in idealising the object which by chance had provoked it.