“Father,” said Robert, “I am not a boy, and you must allow me in these matters to judge for myself.”  As he spoke his spirit rose; the image of the head on his shoulder, defenceless against attack save for him, became clearer and clearer, and words escaped him which he never afterwards forgot, nor did his father forget.  “And it is a shame—­I say it is a shame to speak against her.  You know nothing about her.  Worldly! her children children of wrath, just because she is not of your way of thinking, and isn’t—­and isn’t a humbug, as some of them are.  From anybody else I wouldn’t stand it,” and Robert turned sharply away and went home.

Michael leant against a groyne to support himself, and looked over the water, seeing nothing.  At first he was angry, and if his son had been there, he could have struck him; but presently his anger gave way to pity, to hatred of the girl who had thus seduced him, and to a fixed determination to save him, whatever it might cost.  He pondered again and again over that verse of Paul’s.  He did not believe that he should be excused if he did evil that good might come.  He knew that if he did evil, no matter what the result might be, the penalty to the uttermost farthing would be exacted.  If Christ’s purpose to save mankind could not prevent the Divine anger being poured out on perfect innocence, how much greater would not that anger have been if it had been necessary for Him to sin in order to make the world’s salvation sure!  Michael firmly believed, too, in the dreadful doctrine that a single lapse from the strait path is enough to damn a man for ever; that there is no finiteness in a crime which can be counterbalanced by finite expiation, but that sin is infinite.  Monstrous, we say; and yet it is difficult to find in the strictest Calvinism anything which is not an obvious dogmatic reflection of a natural fact, a mere transference to theology of what had been pressed upon the mind of the creator of the creed as an everyday law of the world.  A crime is infinite in its penalties, and the account is never really balanced, as many of us know too well, the lash being laid on us day after day, even to death, for the failings of fifty years ago.

Michael, with his slow ways, remained many weeks undecided.  During these weeks he said nothing more to his son, nor did his son say anything to him upon the one subject.  Robert was more than ever deferent, and even more than ever affectionate, but there were no signs of any conversion on his part, and to his deference and affection his father paid no regard.  He walked in a world by himself, shut up in it, and incessantly repeated the one question, how could he save his son’s soul?  He pictured himself as a second Christ.  If the Christ, the mighty Saviour, felt His Father’s wrath on that one dreadful night, it was only fitting that he, Michael, a man who was of so much less worth, should feel it for ever to accomplish a similar end.