Paul laughed.  “Things happen to have come out all right, but God knows why.”

“He does,” said Barney Bill very seriously.  “That’s just what He does know.  He knows you had faith.”

“And you, dear old man?” asked Paul, “what have you believed in?”

“My honesty, sonny,” replied Barney Bill, fixing him with his bright eyes. “’Tain’t much.  ’Tain’t very ambitious-like.  But I’ve had my temptations.  I never drove a crooked bargain in my life.”

Paul rose and walked a step or two.

“You’re a better man than I am, Bill.”

Barney Bill rose too, rheumatically, and laid both hands on the young man’s shoulders.  “Have you ever been false to what you really believed to be true?”

“Not essentially,” said Paul.

“Then it’s all right, sonny,” said the old man very earnestly, his bent, ill-clad figure, his old face wizened by years of exposure to suns and frosts, contrasting oddly with the young favourite of fortune.  “It’s all right.  Your father believed in one thing.  I believe in another.  You believe in something else.  But it doesn’t matter a tuppenny damn what one believes in, so long as it’s worth believing in.  It’s faith, sonny, that does it.  Faith and purpose.”

“You’re right,” said Paul.  “Faith and purpose.”

“I believed in yer from the very first, when you were sitting down reading Sir Walter with the bead and tail off.  And I believed in yer when yer used to tell about being ’born to great things!”

Paul laughed.  “That was all childish rubbish,” said he.

“Rubbish?” cried the old man, his head more crooked, his eyes more bright, his gaunt old figure more twisted than ever.  “Haven’t yer got the great things yer believed yer were born to?  Ain’t yer rich?  Ain’t yer famous?  Ain’t yer a Member of Parliament?  Ain’t yer going to marry a Royal Princess?  Good God Almighty! what more d’yer want?”

“Nothing in the wide, wide world!” laughed Paul.