proved that science was a
blatant fraud and a snare that had cost him all he had, his wife, his
boy's future, and his own self-respect. How could he ever look at his
wretched failure again? How could he sit down opposite the son he had
cheated, and who was going to starve with him, and play with a little
City of Hope, when Hope herself was the lying enemy that had coaxed him
to the destruction of his family and to his own disgrace? As for
teaching again, who ever got back a good place after he had voluntarily
given it up for a wild dream! Men who had such dreams were not fit to
teach young men in any case! That was the answer he would get by post in
a day or two.

Newton watched his father anxiously, for he had heard that people
sometimes went mad from disappointment and anxiety. The pale
intellectual face wore a look of horror, as if the dark eyes saw some
dreadful sight; the thin figure moved nervously, the colourless lips
twitched, the lean fingers opened and shut spasmodically on nothing. It
was enough to scare the boy, who had always known his father gentle,
sweet-tempered, and hopeful even under failure; but Overholt was quite
changed now, and looked as if he were either very ill or very crazy.

It is doubtful whether boys ever love their fathers as most of them love
their mothers at one time, or all their lives. The sort of attachment
there often is between father and son is very different from that, and
both feel that it is; there is more of alliance and friendship in it
than of anything like affection, even when it is at its best, with a
strong instinct to help one another and to stand by each other in a
fight.

Newton Overholt did not feel any sympathetic thrill of pain for his
father's sufferings; not in the least; he would perhaps have said that
he was "sorry for him" without quite knowing what that meant. But he was
very strongly moved to help him in some way, seeing that he was
evidently getting the worst of it in a big fight. Newton soon became
entirely possessed by the idea that "something ought to be done," but
what it was he did not know.

The lid of Pandora's box had flown open and had come off suddenly after
smashing the hinges, and Hope had flown out of the window. The boy
thought it was clearly his duty to catch her and get her into prison
again, and then to nail down the lid. He had not the smallest doubt that
this was what he ought to do, but the trouble lay in finding out how to
do it, a l