‘School?’ he exclaimed, when Harry, with satchel over shoulder, came to bid him good morning.  ’I wish I could go in your place!  It’s just thirty-one years since I left the old Grammar-School.’

The boy did not marvel at this.  He would not have done so if the years had been sixty-one; for Mr. Rolfe seemed to him an old man, very much older than his own father.

As usual when at Greystone, Harvey took his first walk to the spots associated with his childhood.  He walked alone, for Morton had gone to business until midday.  On the outskirts of the town, in no very pleasant situation, stood the house where he was born; new buildings had risen round about it, and the present tenants seemed to be undesirable people, who neglected the garden and were careless about their window curtains.  Here he had lived until he was ten years old —­ till the death of his father.  His mother died long before that; he just, and only just, remembered her.  He knew from others that she was a gentle, thoughtful woman, always in poor health; the birth of her second child, a girl, led to a lingering illness, and soon came the end.  To her place as mistress of the house succeeded Harvey’s aunt, his father’s sister.  No one could have been kinder to the children, but Harvey, for some reason yet obscure to him, always disliked her.  Whom, indeed, did he not dislike, of those set over him?  He recalled his perpetual rebellion against her authority from the first day to the last.  What an unruly cub!  And his father’s anger when he chanced to overhear some boyish insolence —­ alas! alas!

For he saw so little of his father.  Mr. Rolfe’s work as a railway engineer kept him chiefly abroad; he was sometimes absent for twelve months at a time.  Only in the last half-year of his life did he remain constantly at home, and that because he was dying.  Having contracted a fever in Spain, he came back to recruit; but his constitution had suffered from many hardships, and now gave way.  To the last day (though he was ten years old) Harvey never dreamt of what was about to happen.  Self-absorbed in a degree unusual even with boys, he feared his father, but had not learnt to love him.  And now, looking back, he saw only too well why the anxious parent treated him with severity more often than with gentleness and good humour.  A boy such as he must have given sore trouble to a father on his death-bed.

When it was too late, too late by many a year, he mourned the loss which had only startled him, which had seemed hardly a loss at all, rather an emancipation.  As a man of thirty, he knew his father much better than when living with him day after day.  Faults he could perceive, some of them inherited in his own character; but there remained the memory of a man whom he could admire and love —­ whom he did admire and love more sincerely and profoundly the older he grew.  And he held it the supreme misfortune of his life that, in those early years which count so much towards the future, he had been so rarely under his father’s influence.