ll you something which has been
locked in my own heart ever since you were a boy of five. Something I
have never told you before because it only brought sorrow and
suffering to me, and I wanted only the sunny side of life for you and
Madeleine, and so I have kept still. I tell you now in the hope that
it may save you from an act you will never cease to regret.

"There comes a time in every man's life when he meets the fork in the
road. This is his crisis. One path leads to destruction, the other,
perhaps, to misery--but a misery in which he can still look every man
in the face and his God as well. You have reached it. You may not
think so, but you have. Carry out what you have told me and you are no
longer an honest man. Don't be offended. Listen and don't interrupt
me. Nothing you could say to me would hurt my heart; nothing I shall
say to you should hurt yours. I love you with a love you know not of.
I loved you when you were no higher than my knee."

Phil looked at him in amazement, and was about to speak when Adam
waved his hand.

"No, don't speak. Hear me until I have finished. Only to save the boy
she loved would I lay bare my heart as I am going to do to you now.
Turn your head! Do you see that picture? I painted it some twenty-five
years ago; you were a child then, five years old. I was younger than
you are now; full of my art; full of the promise of life. Your
father's home was a revelation to me: the comfort of it, the servants,
the luxury, the warm welcome he gave me, the way he treated me, not as
a stranger, but as a son. A few days after I arrived he left me in
charge of his home. Your mother was three years younger than I was;
you were a little fellow tugging at her skirts.

"The four weeks that followed, while your father was away and I was
painting the portrait, were to me a dream. At the end of it I awoke in
torment. I had reached the fork in my road: one path lay to perdition,
the other to a suffering that has followed me all my life. Your father
was an austere man of about my own age now; it was not a happy
union--it was as if Madeleine and I should be married. Your mother,
girl as she was, respected and honored him and had no other thought
except her duty; I saw it and tried to comfort her. The day of your
father's return home he came up into the garret which had been turned
into a studio to see the portrait. The scene that followed has always
been to me a horror. He denounced her and me. He even