A little later came the father on his annual visit, and the dire thing was done.  The most ancient and honoured of all the idols fell with a crash.  A perfect father was lost in some common, swaggering, loud-voiced, street-mannered creature, grotesquely self-satisfied, of a cheap, shabby smartness, who came flaunting those things he should not have flaunted, and proclaiming in every turn of his showy head his lack of those things without which the little boy now saw no one could be a gentleman.

He cried in his bed that night, after futile efforts to believe that some fearful change had been wrought in his father.  But his memory of former visits was scrupulously photographic—­phonographic even.  He recalled from the past certain effects once keenly joyed in that now made his cheeks burn.  The things rioted brutally before him, until it seemed that something inside of him strove to suppress them—­as if a shamed hand reached out from his heart to brush the whole offense into decent hiding with one quick sweep.

This time he took care that Nancy should not meet his father.  Yet he walked the streets with him as before—­walking defiantly and with shame those streets through which he had once led the perfect father in festal parade, to receive the applause of a respectful populace.  Now he went forth awkwardly, doggedly, keen for signs that others saw what he did, and quick to burn with bitter, unreasoning resentment, when he detected that they did so.  Once his father rallied him upon his “grumpiness”; then he grew sullen—­though trying to smile—­thinking with mortification of his grandfather.  He understood the old man now.

He was glad when the week came to an end.  Bruised, bewildered, shamed, but loyal still and resentful toward others who might see as he did, he was glad when his father went—­this time as Professor Alfiretti, doing a twenty-minute turn of hypnotism and mind-reading with the Gus Levy All-Star Shamrock Vaudeville, playing the “ten-twenty-thirties,” whatever they were!

CHAPTER XI

THE STRONG PERSON’S NARRATIVE

Near the close of the following winter came news of the father’s death.  In some town of which the boy had never heard, in another State, a ramshackle wooden theatre had burned one night and the father had perished in the fire through his own foolhardiness.  The news came by two channels:  first, a brief and unilluminating paragraph in the newspaper, giving little more than the fact itself.

But three days later came a friend of the father, bringing his few poor effects and a full relation of the matter.  He was a person of kind heart, evidently, to whom the father had spoken much of his boys in Edom—­a bulky, cushiony, youngish man who was billed on the advertising posters of the Gus Levy All-Star Shamrock Vaudeville as “Samson the Second,” with a portrait of himself supporting on the mighty arch of his chest a grand piano, upon which were superimposed three sizable and busy violinists.