bumpkin is this, and perhaps I say to him cruelly: "Boy, you are
uncommonly like your mother."

To which David: "Is that why you are so kind to me?"

I suppose I am kind to him, but if so it is not for love of his mother,
but because he sometimes calls me father. On my honour as a soldier,
there is nothing more in it than that. I must not let him know this, for
it would make him conscious, and so break the spell that binds him and
me together. Oftenest I am but Captain W---- to him, and for the best of
reasons. He addresses me as father when he is in a hurry only, and never
have I dared ask him to use the name. He says, "Come, father," with an
accursed beautiful carelessness. So let it be, David, for a little while
longer.

I like to hear him say it before others, as in shops. When in shops he
asks the salesman how much money he makes in a day, and which drawer he
keeps it in, and why his hair is red, and does he like Achilles, of whom
David has lately heard, and is so enamoured that he wants to die to meet
him. At such times the shopkeepers accept me as his father, and I cannot
explain the peculiar pleasure this gives me. I am always in two minds
then, to linger that we may have more of it, and to snatch him away
before he volunteers the information, "He is not really my father."

When David meets Achilles I know what will happen. The little boy will
take the hero by the hand, call him father, and drag him away to some
Round Pond.

One day, when David was about five, I sent him the following letter:
"Dear David: If you really want to know how it began, will you come and
have a chop with me to-day at the club?"

Mary, who, I have found out, opens all his letters, gave her consent,
and, I doubt not, instructed him to pay heed to what happened so that he
might repeat it to her, for despite her curiosity she knows not how
it began herself. I chuckled, guessing that she expected something
romantic.

He came to me arrayed as for a mighty journey, and looking unusually
solemn, as little boys always do look when they are wearing a great
coat. There was a shawl round his neck. "You can take some of them off,"
I said, "when we come to summer."

"Shall we come to summer?" he asked, properly awed.

"To many summers," I replied, "for we are going away back, David, to see
your mother as she was in the days before there was you."

We hailed a hansom. "Drive back six years," I said to the cabby, "and
stop at the Junior Old