Once this happened when his father and he were walking silently home from the works, and his father said, without touching him or showing his sympathy except in his tone of humorously frank recognition, “Does it still hurt a little occasionally, Dan?”

“Yes, sir, it hurts,” said the son; and he turned his face aside, and whistled through his teeth.

“Well, it’s a trial, I suppose,” said his father, with his gentle, soft half-lisp.  “But there are greater trials.”

“How, greater?” asked Dan, with sad incredulity.  “I’ve lost all that made life worth living; and it’s all my own fault, too.”

“Yes,” said his father; “I think she was a good girl.”

“Good!” cried Dan; the word seemed to choke him.

“Still, I doubt if it’s all your fault.”  Dan looked round at him.  He added, “And I think it’s perhaps for the best as it is.”

Dan halted, and then said, “Oh, I suppose so,” with dreary resignation, as they walked on.

“Let us go round by the paddock,” said his father, “and see if Pat’s put the horses up yet.  You can hardly remember your mother, before she became an invalid, I suppose,” he added, as Dan mechanically turned aside with him from the path that led to the house into that leading to the barn.

“No; I was such a little fellow,” said Dan.

“Women give up a great deal when they marry,” said the elder.  “It’s not strange that they exaggerate the sacrifice, and expect more in return than it’s in the nature of men to give them.  I should have been sorry to have you marry a woman of an exacting disposition.”

“I’m afraid she was exacting,” said Dan.  “But she never asked more than was right.”

“And it’s difficult to do all that’s right,” suggested the elder.

“I’m sure you always have, father,” said the son.

The father did not respond.  “I wish you could remember your mother when she was well,” he said.  Presently he added, “I think it isn’t best for a woman to be too much in love with her husband.”

Dan took this to himself, and he laughed harshly.  “She’s been able to dissemble her love at last.”

His father went on, “Women keep the romantic feeling longer than men; it dies out of us very soon—­perhaps too soon.”

“You think I couldn’t have come to time?” asked Dan.  “Well, as it’s turned out, I won’t have to.”

“No man can be all a woman wishes him to be,” said his father.  “It’s better for the disappointment to come before it’s too late.”

“I was to blame,” said Dan stoutly.  “She was all right.”

“You were to blame in the particular instance,” his father answered.  “But in general the fault was in her—­or her temperament.  As long as the romance lasted she might have deluded herself, and believed you were all she imagined you; but romance can’t last, even with women.  I don like your faults, and I don’t want you to excuse them to yourself.  I don’t like your chancing things, and leaving them to come out all right of themselves; but I’ve always tried to make you children see all your qualities in their true proportion and relation.”