“You know my love for you, my son.  The extent of it you cannot know; but you must know that it is something very deep, and—­I do not wish to speak of it—­but a father must sometimes petition for gratitude, since the only true expression of it is his son’s moral good.  If you care for my love, or love me in return, aid me with all your energies to keep you what I have made you, and guard you from the snares besetting you.  It was in my hands once.  It is ceasing to be so.  Remember, my son, what my love is.  It is different, I fear, with most fathers:  but I am bound up in your welfare:  what you do affects me vitally.  You will take no step that is not intimate with my happiness, or my misery.  And I have had great disappointments, my son.”

So far it was well.  Richard loved his father, and even in his frenzied state he could not without emotion hear him thus speak.

Unhappily, the baronet, who by some fatality never could see when he was winning the battle, thought proper in his wisdom to water the dryness of his sermon with a little jocoseness, on the subject of young men fancying themselves in love, and, when they were raw and green, absolutely wanting to be—­that most awful thing, which the wisest and strongest of men undertake in hesitation and after self-mortification and penance—­married!  He sketched the Foolish Young Fellow—­the object of general ridicule and covert contempt.  He sketched the Woman—­the strange thing made in our image, and with all our faculties—­passing to the rule of one who in taking her proved that he could not rule himself, and had no knowledge of her save as a choice morsel which he would burn the whole world, and himself in the bargain, to possess.  He harped upon the Foolish Young Fellow, till the foolish young fellow felt his skin tingle and was half suffocated with shame and rage.

After this, the baronet might be as wise as he pleased:  he had quite undone his work.  He might analyze Love and anatomize Woman.  He might accord to her her due position, and paint her fair:  he might be shrewd, jocose, gentle, pathetic, wonderfully wise:  he spoke to deaf ears.

Closing his sermon with the question, softly uttered:  “Have you anything to tell me, Richard?” and hoping for a confession, and a thorough re-establishment of confidence, the callous answer struck him cold:  “I have not.”

The baronet relapsed in his chair, and made diagrams of his fingers.

Richard turned his back on further dialogue by going to the window.  In the section of sky over the street twinkled two or three stars; shining faintly, feeling the moon.  The moon was rising:  the woods were lifting up to her:  his star of the woods would be there.  A bed of moss set about flowers in a basket under him breathed to his nostril of the woodland keenly, and filled him with delirious longing.

A succession of hard sighs brought his father’s hand on his shoulder.

“You have nothing you could say to me, my son?  Tell me, Richard!  Remember, there is no home for the soul where dwells a shadow of untruth!”