“Basil,” pursued my father, gravely and sadly; “I hope and believe that I have little to reproach myself with in my conduct towards you.  I think I am justified in saying, that very few fathers would have acted towards a son as I have acted for the last year or more.  I may often have grieved over the secresy which has estranged you from us; I may even have shown you by my manner that I resented it; but I have never used my authority to force you into the explanation of your conduct, which you have been so uniformly unwilling to volunteer.  I rested on that implicit faith in the honour and integrity of my son, which I will not yet believe to have been ill-placed, but which, I fear, has led me to neglect too long the duty of inquiry which I owed to your own well-being, and to my position towards you.  I am now here to atone for this omission; circumstances have left me no choice.  It deeply concerns my interest as a father, and my honour as the head of our family, to know what heavy misfortune it was (I can imagine it to be nothing else) that stretched my son senseless in the open street, and afflicted him afterwards with an illness which threatened his reason and his life.  You are now sufficiently recovered to reveal this; and I only use my legitimate authority over my own children, when I tell you that I must now know all.  If you persist in remaining silent, the relations between us must henceforth change for life.”

“I am ready to make my confession, Sir.  I only ask you to believe beforehand, that if I have sinned grievously against you, I have been already heavily punished for the sin.  I am afraid it is impossible that your worst forebodings can have prepared you—­”

“The words you spoke in your delirium—­words which I heard, but will not judge you by—­justified the worst forebodings.”

“My illness has spared me the hardest part of a hard trial, Sir, if it has prepared you for what I have to confess; if you suspect—­”

“I do not suspect—­I feel but too sure, that you, my second son, from whom I had expected far better things, have imitated in secret—­I am afraid, outstripped—­the worst vices of your elder brother.”

“My brother!—­my brother’s faults mine!  Ralph!”

“Yes, Ralph.  It is my last hope that you will now imitate Ralph’s candour.  Take example from that best part of him, as you have already taken example from the worst.”

My heart grew faint and cold as he spoke.  Ralph’s example!  Ralph’s vices!—­vices of the reckless hour, or the idle day!—­vices whose stain, in the world’s eye, was not a stain for life!—­convenient, reclaimable vices, that men were mercifully unwilling to associate with grinning infamy and irreparable disgrace!  How far—­how fearfully far, my father was from the remotest suspicion of what had really happened!  I tried to answer his last words, but the apprehension of the life-long humiliation and grief which my confession might inflict on him—­absolutely incapable, as he appeared to be, of foreboding even the least degrading part of it—­kept me speechless.  When he resumed, after a momentary silence, his tones were stern, his looks searching—­pitilessly searching, and bent full upon my face.