which he couldn’t answer!  They were very careful visits, made only when Maurice was sure Eleanor would not be going to “look for a cook.”  He always balanced his brief pleasure of an hour with his little boy by an added gentleness to his wife—­perhaps a bunch of violets, bought at the florist’s on Maple Street where Lily got her flower pots or her bulbs.  He was very lonely, and increasingly bothered about Jacky. ...  “Lily will let him go plumb to hell.  But I put him on the toboggan! ...  I’m responsible for his existence,” he used to think.  And sometimes he repeated the words he had spoken that night when he had felt the first stir of fatherhood, “My little Jacky.”

He would hardly have said he loved the child; love had come so gradually, that he had not recognized it!  Yet it had come.  It had been added to those other intimations of God, which also he had not recognized.  Personal Joy on his wedding day had been the first; and the next had come when he looked up at the heights of Law among the stars, and then there had been the terrifying vision of the awfulness of Life, at Jacky’s birth.  Now, into his soul, arid with long untruth, came this flooding in of Love—­which in itself is Life, and Joy, and the fulfilling of Law!  Or, as he had said, once, carelessly, “Call it God.”

This pursuing God, this inescapable God! was making him acutely uncomfortable now, about Jacky.  Maurice felt the discomfort, but he did not recognize it as Salvation, or know Whose mercy sent it!  He merely did what most of us do when we suffer:  he gave the credit of his pain to the devil—­not to Infinite Love.  “Oh,” the poor fellow thought, coming back one day from a call at the little secret house on Maple Street, “the devil’s getting his money’s worth out of me; well, I won’t squeal about that!  But he’s getting his money’s worth out of my boy, too.  She’s ruining him!”

He said this once when he had been rather recklessly daring in seeing “his boy.”  It was Saturday afternoon, and Jacky was free from his detested school.  Maurice had given him a new sled, and then had “fallen,” as he expressed it, to the little fellow’s entreaty:  “Mr. Curtis, if you’ll come up to the hill, I’ll show you how she’ll go!” But before they started Maurice had a disagreeable five minutes with Lily.  She had told him, tears of laughter running down her rosy cheeks, of some performance of Jacky’s.  He had asked her, she said, about his paw; “and I said his name was Mr. George Dale, and he died ten or eleven years ago of consumption—­had to tell him something, you know!  An’ he says,—­he’s great on arithmetic,—­’Poor paw!’ he says, ’how many years was that before I was born?’ I declare, I was all balled up!” Then, as she wiped her laughing eyes, she had grown suddenly angry:  “I’m going to take him away from his new Sunday school; the teacher—­it was her did the Paul Pry act, and asked him about his father;—­well, I guess she ain’t much of a lady; I never see her name in the Sunday papers;—­she came down on Jacky because he told her a ‘lie’; that’s what she called it, ‘a lie’!  Said he’d go to hell if he told lies.  I said, ’I won’t have you threatening my child!’ I declare I felt like saying, ’You go to hell yourself!’ but of course I don’t say things that ain’t refined.”