“But the Prof. he was certainly a great boy for puttin’ up three-sheets about his own two kids; anybody that would listen—­friend or stranger—­made no difference to him.  He starred ’em to anybody, you understan’—­what corkers they was, and all like that.  It seemed like Kelly’s havin’ two kids also kind ’a touched on his feelin’s.  Honest, I ain’t ever got so worked up over anything before in me whole life.”

When this person had gone the old man called the two boys to his room and prayed with them; keeping the younger to sit with him a long time afterward, as if feeling that his was the heavier heart.

CHAPTER XII

A NEW THEORY OF A CERTAIN WICKED MAN

The time of the first sorrow was difficult for the boy.  There was that first hard sleep after one we love has gone—­in which we must always dream that it is not true—­a sleep from which we awaken to suffer all the shock of it again.  Then came black nights when the perfect love for the perfect father came back in all its early tenderness to cry the little boy to sleep.  Yet it went rapidly enough at last, as times of sorrow go for the young.  There even came a day when he found in a secret place of his heart a chastened, hopeful inquiry if all might not have been for the best.  He had loved his father—­there had been between them an unbreakable bond; yet this very love had made him suffer at every thought of him while he was living, whereas now he could love him with all tender memories and with no poisonous misgivings about future meetings with their humiliations.  Now his father was made perfect in Heaven, and even Grandfather Delcher—­whose aloofness here he had ceased to blame—­would not refuse to meet and know him there.

Naturally, then, he turned to his grandfather in his great need for a new idol to fill the vacant niche.  Aforetime the old man in his study upstairs had been little more than a gray shadow, a spirit of gloom, stubbornly imprisoning another spirit that would have been kind if it could have escaped.  But the little boy drew near to him, and found him curiously companionable.  Where once he had shunned him, he now went freely to the study with his lessons or his storybook, or for talk of any little matter.  His grandfather, it seemed, could understand many things which so old a man could scarcely have been expected to understand.  In token of this there would sometimes creep over his brown old face a soft light that made it seem as if there must still be within him somewhere the child he had once been; as if, perhaps, he looked into the little boy as into a mirror that threw the sunlight of his own boyhood into his time-worn face.  Side by side, before the old man’s fire, they would talk or muse, since they were friendly enough to be silent if they liked.  Only one confidence the little boy could not bring himself to make:  he could not tell the old man that he no longer felt hard toward him, as once he had done, for his coldness to his father; that he had divined—­and felt a great shame for—­the true reason of that coldness.  But he thought the old man must understand without words.  It was hardly a matter to be talked of.