his boyhood stole in upon
him. He thought of that terrible day when his father stood by his
bedside, and had bidden him in an awful voice ask no more for his
mother, and think of her only as dead; and he remembered well the chill
of cold despair with which he had realized that that fair, sweet woman,
who had called him her little son, and who had accepted his devoted
boyish affection with a sort of amused pleasure, was gone from him for
ever. Henceforth life would indeed be a dreary thing, alone with that
cold, silent student, with whom he was almost afraid to speak, and whom
he scarcely ever addressed by the name of father.

A dreary time it had indeed been. His memory glanced lightly over the
long monotonous years with a sort of shuddering recoil. He thought of
his father's frequent absences, and of his return from one of them in
the middle of a winter's night, propped up in an invalid carriage, with
a surgeon in attendance, and blood-stained bandages around his leg. And
he thought of a night when he had sat up with him while the nurse
rested, and one name had ceaselessly burst from those white feverish
lips, laden with fierce curses and deep vindictive hate, a name which
had since been written into his memory with letters of fire. Further and
further on his memory dragged him, until he himself, a boy no longer,
had stood upon the threshold of man-hood, and on one awful night had
heard from his father's lips that story which had cast its shadow across
his life. Then for the first time had sprung up of some sort of sympathy
between them, sympathy which had for its foundation a common hatred, a
common sense of deep, unpardonable wrong. The oath which his father had
sworn with trembling lips the son had echoed, and in dread of the
vengeance of these two, the man against whom they had sworn it cut
himself off from his fellows, and skulked in every out-of-the-way corner
of Europe, a hunted being in peril of his life. There had come a great
change over their lives, and they had drifted farther apart again. He
himself had gone out into the world something of a scholar and something
of a pedant, and he had found that all his ideas of life had lain
rusting in his country home, and that he had almost as much to unlearn
as to learn. With ample means, and an eager thirst for knowledge, he had
passed from one to another of the great seats of learning of the world.
But his lesson was not taught him at one of them. He learned it not