the results were made equal.

"What is the use of it all," he asked himself, "my struggle, involuntary
though it was, my self-abnegation, my rigidity, when what little
character I have built up is overshadowed by my father's past? Why
should I have worked so hard and long for those rewards, real or
fancied, the favour of God and the respect of men, when he, after a
career of outrageous dissipation, by a simple act or claim of repentance
wins the Deity's smile and is received into the arms of people with
gushing favour, while I am looked upon as the natural recipient of all
his evil? Of course they tell us that there is more joy over the one
lamb that is found than over the ninety and nine that went not astray;
it puts rather a high premium on straying." He laughed bitterly. "With
what I have behind me, is it worth being decent for the sake of decency?
After all, is the game worth the candle?"

He took up a little book which many times that morning he had been
attempting to read. It was an edition of Matthew Arnold's poems, and one
of the stanzas was marked. It was in "Mycerinus."

Oh, wherefore cheat our youth, if thus it be,
Of one short joy, one lust, one pleasant dream,
Stringing vain words of powers we cannot see,
Blind divinations of a will supreme?
Lost labour! when the circumambient gloom
But holds, if gods, gods careless of our doom!

He laid the book down with a sigh. It seemed to fit his case.

It was not until the next morning, however, that his anticipations were
realised, and the telegraph messenger stopped at his door. The telegram
was signed Eliphalet Hodges, and merely said, "Come at once. You are
needed."

"Needed"! What could they "need" of him? "Wanted" would have been a
better word,--"wanted" by the man who for sixteen years had forgotten
that he had a son. He had already decided that he would not go, and was
for the moment sorry that he had stayed where the telegram could reach
him and stir his mind again into turmoil; but the struggle had already
recommenced. Maybe his father was burdening his good old friends, and it
was they who "needed" him. Then it was his duty to go, but not for his
father's sake. He would not even see his father. No, not that! He could
not see him.

It ended by his getting his things together and taking the next train.
He was going, he told himself, to the relief of his guardian and his
friend, and not because his father--his father!--wan