“Don’t talk now, boy—­be advised by me.  It’s not well for you—­you are not strong.  Please let me guide you now.  Go back to your studies, put all these matters from your mind—­study your studies and play your play.  Play harder than you study—­you need it more.  Play out of doors—­you must have a horse to ride.  You have thought too much before your time for thinking.  Put away the troublesome things, and live in the flesh as a healthy boy should.  Trust me.  When you come to—­to those matters again, they will not trouble you.”

In his eagerness, first one hand had gone to the boy’s shoulder, then the other, and his tones grew warm with pleading, while the keen old eyes played as a searchlight over the troubled young face.

“I must tell you at least one thing, sir.”

The old man forced a smile around his trembling mouth, and again assumed his little jaunty lightness.

“Come, come, boy—­not ‘sir.’  Call me ‘old man’ and you shall say anything.”

But the boy was constrained, plainly in discomfort.  “I—­I can’t call you that—­just now—­sir.”

“Well, if you must, tell me one thing—­but only one! only one, mind you, boy!” In fear, but smiling, he waited.

“Well, sir, it’s a shock I suffered just before I was sick.  It came to me one night when I sat down to dinner—­fearfully hungry.  I had a thick English chop on the plate before me; and a green salad, oily in its bowl, and crisp, browned potatoes, and a mug of creamy ale.  I’d gone to the place for a treat.  I’d been whetting my appetite with nibbles of bread and sips of ale until the other things came; and then, even when I put my knife to the chop—­like a blade pushed very slowly into my heart came the thought:  ’My father is burning in hell—­screaming in agony for a drop of this water which I shall not touch because I have ale.  He has been in this agony for years; he will be there forever.’  That was enough, sir.  I had to leave the little feast.  I was hungry no longer, though a moment before it had seemed that I couldn’t wait for it.  I walked out into the cold, raw night—­walked till near daylight, with the sweat running off me.  And the thing I knew all the time was this:  that if I were in hell and my father in heaven, he would blaspheme God to His face for a monster and come to hell to burn with me forever—­come with a joke and a song, telling me never to mind, that we’d have a fine time there in hell in spite of everything!  That was what I knew of my poor, cheap, fiddle-playing mountebank of a father.  Just a moment more—­this is what you must remember of me, in whatever I have to say hereafter, that after that night I never ceased to suffer all the hell my father could be suffering, and I suffered it until my mind went out in that sickness.  But, listen now:  whatever has happened—­I’m not yet sure what it is—­I no longer suffer.  Two things only I know:  that our creed still has my godless, scoffing, unbaptised father in hell, and that my love for him—­my absolute oneness with him—­has not lessened.