nstantly at home, and that because he was dying. Having contracted a
fever in Spain, he came back to recruit; but his constitution had
suffered from many hardships, and now gave way. To the last day (though
he was ten years old) Harvey never dreamt of what was about to happen.
Self-absorbed in a degree unusual even with boys, he feared his father,
but had not learnt to love him. And now, looking back, he saw only too
well why the anxious parent treated him with severity more often than
with gentleness and good humour. A boy such as he must have given sore
trouble to a father on his death-bed.

When it was too late, too late by many a year, he mourned the loss
which had only startled him, which had seemed hardly a loss at all,
rather an emancipation. As a man of thirty, he knew his father much
better than when living with him day after day. Faults he could
perceive, some of them inherited in his own character; but there
remained the memory of a man whom he could admire and love--whom he did
admire and love more sincerely and profoundly the older he grew. And he
held it the supreme misfortune of his life that, in those early years
which count so much towards the future, he had been so rarely under his
father's influence.

Inevitable, it seemed. Yet only so, perhaps, because even a good and
conscientious man may fail to understand the obligation under which he
lies towards his offspring.

He and his sister Amy passed into the guardianship of Dr Harvey, Mr
Rolfe's old friend, the boy's godfather, who had done his best to
soothe the mind of the dying man with regard to his children's future.
There were no pecuniary difficulties; the children's education was
provided for, and on coming of age each would have about two thousand
pounds. Dr Harvey, a large-hearted, bright-witted Irishman, with no
youngsters of his own, speedily decided that the boy must be sent away
to a boarding-school, to have some of the self-will knocked out of him.
Amy continued to live with her aunt for two years more; then the good
woman died, and the Doctor took Amy into his own house, which became
Harvey's home during holidays.

The ivy-covered house, in the best residential street of Greystone.
Harvey paused before it. On the railings hung a brass plate with
another name; the good old Doctor had been in his grave for many a year.

What wonder that he never liked the boy? Harvey, so far as anyone could
perceive, had no affection, no good feeling, n