Dredge smiled slowly. “There are so few things one really knows.”

“Oh, damn your scientific hair-splitting! Don’t you know you’re insulting my father’s memory?”

Dredge stared again, turning his spectacles thoughtfully from one of us to the other.

“Oh, that’s it, is it? Then you’d better sit down. If you don’t see at once it’ll take some time to make you.”

Archie burst into an ironic laugh.

“I rather think it will!” he conceded.

“Sit down, Archie,” I said, setting the example; and he obeyed, with a gesture that made his consent a protest.

Dredge seemed to notice nothing beyond the fact that his visitors were seated. He reached for his pipe, and filled it with the care which the habit of delicate manipulations gave to all the motions of his long, knotty hands.

“It’s about the lectures?” he said.

Archie’s answer was a deep scornful breath.

“You’ve only been back a week, so you’ve only heard one, I suppose?”

“It was not necessary to hear even that one. You must know the talk they’re making. If notoriety is what you’re after—”

“Well, I’m not sorry to make a noise,” said Dredge, putting a match to his pipe.

Archie bounded in his chair. “There’s no easier way of doing it than to attack a man who can’t answer you!”

Dredge raised a sobering hand. “Hold on. Perhaps you and I don’t mean the same thing. Tell me first what’s in your mind.”

The request steadied Archie, who turned on Dredge a countenance really eloquent with filial indignation.

“It’s an odd question for you to ask; it makes me wonder what’s in yours. Not much thought of my father, at any rate, or you couldn’t stand in his place and use the chance he’s given you to push yourself at his expense.”

Dredge received this in silence, puffing slowly at his pipe.

“Is that the way it strikes you?” he asked at length.

“God! It’s the way it would strike most men.”

He turned to me. “You too?”

“I can see how Archie feels,” I said.

“That I’m attacking his father’s memory to glorify myself?”

“Well, not precisely: I think what he really feels is that, if your convictions didn’t permit you to continue his father’s teaching, you might perhaps have done better to sever your connection with the Lanfear lectureship.”

“Then you and he regard the Lanfear lectureship as having been founded to perpetuate a dogma, not to try and get at the truth?”

“Certainly not,” Archie broke in. “But there’s a question of taste, of delicacy, involved in the case that can’t be decided on abstract principles. We know as well as you that my father meant the laboratory and the lectureship to serve the ends of science, at whatever cost to his own special convictions; what we feel—and you don’t seem to—is that you’re the last man to put them to that use; and I don’t want to remind you why.”

A slight redness rose through Dredge’s sallow skin. “You needn’t,” he said. “It’s because he pulled me out of my hole, woke me up, made me, shoved me off from the shore. Because he saved me ten or twenty years of muddled effort, and put me where I am at an age when my best working years are still ahead of me. Every one knows that’s what your father did for me, but I’m the only person who knows the time and trouble that it took.”