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endurance; this brain of mine, that has tried so hard to perfect itself
and to give its possible successor the faculty for thought and work and
self-mastery. My father was a strong man, a great man. And much of the
little power and goodness and worthiness that exist in me, I owe to him.
No man in future years can say that of _me_. It must be something that
no childless man can understand or dream of, to feel the fingers of
one's little son tugging at one. To,--Lord! What would Mother
Batholommey say if she could hear me maundering and havering away like
this! It means nothing to _you_, either. Except that you've had, and
hated, and thrown away what many a better man would give half his life
for."

There was a short silence. McPherson, ashamed of blurting his sacred
heart secrets to a fellow he detested, sat gnawing angrily at his ragged
grey moustache. Frederik, to whom the last part of the doctor's tirade
had passed unheard, stood gazing sightlessly at the ground before him.
And for a space, neither of them spoke.

At length Frederik looked up, almost timidly.

"Could--might I see him?" he asked.

"H'm?" grunted McPherson, starting from the maze of his own unhappy
thoughts.

"I say, may I go in and see----?"

"Had three years to see him in, didn't you?" demanded McPherson. "I
can't recall now that I ever saw you glance at him when you could help
it. Why should you go in and see him now? You can't frighten him any
more."

He checked himself.

"That last was a rotten thing for me to say," he muttered grudgingly.
"I'm sorry."

But Frederik showed no signs of resentment. He was looking moodily at
the ground once more, apparently engrossed in the fruitless efforts of a
red ant on the walk's edge to lug away a dead caterpillar forty times
its size. The doctor peered at him almost apologetically from under his
grey thatch of eyebrow. The younger man's face still wore that same
blank, dazed mask, as though horror had wiped it clean of expression.
Again it was Frederik who broke the silence.

"I remember once," said he, in a dreary monotone, "when he was four
years old. He saw a woolly lamb in a shop window and wanted it. I'd lost
ninety dollars that day at the races and I was sore. He begged me to buy
him the lamb. It cost only a quarter. I wouldn't. I told him he ought to
be content to sponge on me for food and clothes without wanting
presents, too. I remember he cried when I pulled him away from the shop
wi