“It is a mean, dastardly step, Sallie.  God will never forgive me if I take it,” and David could hear that his son’s voice trembled.

In fact, great tears were silently dropping from Sandy’s eyes, and his father knew it, and pitied him, and thanked God that the lad’s heart was yet so tender.  And after this he felt strangely calm, and dropped into a happy sleep.

In the morning he remembered all.  He had not heard the end of the argument, but he knew that Sallie would succeed; and he was neither astonished nor dismayed when Sandy came home in the middle of the day and asked him to “go down the avenue a bit.”

He had determined to speak first and spare Sandy the shame and the sorrow of it; but something would not let him do it.  In the first place, a singular lightness of heart came over him; he noticed all the gay preparations for Christmas, and the cries and bustle of the streets gave him a new sense of exhilaration.  Sandy fell almost unconsciously into his humor.  He had a few cents in his pocket, and he suddenly determined to go into a cheap restaurant and have a good warm meal with his father.

Davie was delighted at the proposal and gay as a child; old memories of days long past crowded into both men’s minds, and they ate and drank, and then wandered on almost happily.  Davie knew very well where they were going, but he determined now to put off saying a word until the last moment.  He had Sandy all to himself for this hour; they might never have such another; Davie was determined to take all the sweetness of it.

As they got lower down the avenue, Sandy became more and more silent; his eyes looked straight before him, but they were brimful of tears, and the smile with which he answered Davie’s pleasant prattle was almost more pitiful than tears.

At length they came in sight of a certain building, and Sandy gave a start and shook himself like a man waking out of a sleep.  His words were sharp, his voice almost like that of a man in mortal danger, as he turned Davie quickly round, and said: 

“We must go back now, father.  I will not go another step this road—­no, by heaven! though I die for it!”

“Just a little further, Sandy.”

And Davie’s thin, childlike face had an inquiry in it that Sandy very well understood.

“No, no, father, no further on this road, please God!”

Then he hailed a passing car, and put the old man tenderly in it, and resolutely turned his back upon the hated point to which he had been going.

Of course he thought of Sallie as they rode home, and the children and the trouble there was likely to be.  But somehow it seemed a light thing to him.  He could not helping nodding cheerfully now and then to the father whom he had so nearly lost; and, perhaps, never in all their lives had they been so precious to each other as when, hand-in-hand, they climbed the dark tenement stair together.