“It’s an odd question for you to ask; it makes me wonder what’s in yours.  Not much thought of my father, at any rate, or you couldn’t stand in his place and use the chance he’s given you to push yourself at his expense.”

Dredge received this in silence, puffing slowly at his pipe.

“Is that the way it strikes you?” he asked at length.

“God!  It’s the way it would strike most men.”

He turned to me.  “You too?”

“I can see how Archie feels,” I said.

“That I’m attacking his father’s memory to glorify myself?”

“Well, not precisely:  I think what he really feels is that, if your convictions didn’t permit you to continue his father’s teaching, you might perhaps have done better to sever your connection with the Lanfear lectureship.”

“Then you and he regard the Lanfear lectureship as having been founded to perpetuate a dogma, not to try and get at the truth?”

“Certainly not,” Archie broke in.  “But there’s a question of taste, of delicacy, involved in the case that can’t be decided on abstract principles.  We know as well as you that my father meant the laboratory and the lectureship to serve the ends of science, at whatever cost to his own special convictions; what we feel—­and you don’t seem to—­is that you’re the last man to put them to that use; and I don’t want to remind you why.”

A slight redness rose through Dredge’s sallow skin.  “You needn’t,” he said.  “It’s because he pulled me out of my hole, woke me up, made me, shoved me off from the shore.  Because he saved me ten or twenty years of muddled effort, and put me where I am at an age when my best working years are still ahead of me.  Every one knows that’s what your father did for me, but I’m the only person who knows the time and trouble that it took.”

It was well said, and I glanced quickly at Archie, who was never closed to generous emotions.

“Well, then—?” he said, flushing also.

“Well, then,” Dredge continued, his voice deepening and losing its nasal edge, “I had to pay him back, didn’t I?”

The sudden drop flung Archie back on his prepared attitude of irony.  “It would be the natural inference—­with most men.”

“Just so.  And I’m not so very different.  I knew your father wanted a successor—­some one who’d try and tie up the loose ends.  And I took the lectureship with that object.”

“And you’re using it to tear the whole fabric to pieces!”

Dredge paused to re-light his pipe.  “Looks that way,” he conceded.  “This year anyhow.”

“_ This year_—?” Archie gasped at him.

“Yes.  When I took up the job I saw it just as your father left it.  Or rather, I didn’t see any other way of going on with it.  The change came gradually, as I worked.”

“Gradually?  So that you had time to look round you, to know where you were, to see you were fatally committed to undoing the work he had done?”