As the major thus reflected, he kept coming nearer and nearer to the Individual lurking at the keyhole of every story. Only he had to go home. Otherwise, how was his father to receive him?

“I wonder,” he said, “if when a man dies, that is counted as going home. I hardly think so, for that is something no man can help. I should find myself no better off than this young rascal when he goes home because he can’t help it!”

The end of it was that the major, there in the middle of the night, got down on his knees and tried, as he had not done in years, to say the prayers his mother had taught him—speaking from his heart as if one was listening, one who, in the dead of the night, did not sleep, but kept wide awake lest one of his children should cry.

In his wife’s room, Gerald Raymount sat on into the dead of the night. At last, as his wife continued to sleep soundly, he thought he would go down to his study and find something to turn his thoughts from his misery. None such had come to him as to his friend. He had been much more of a religious man than the major, but it was the idea of religion, and the thousand ideas it broods, more than the practice of it daily, that was his delight. He philosophized and philosophized well of the relations between man and his maker, of the necessity to human nature of a belief in a God, of the disastrous consequences of having none, and such like things. But having an interest is a very different thing from being in such a close relation with the father that the thought of him is an immediate and ever-returning joy and strength. He did not rejoice in the thought of the inheritance of the saints in light, as the inheriting of the nature of God, the being made partaker of the father’s essential blessedness: he was far yet from that. He was so busy understanding with his intellect that he missed the better understanding of heart and imagination. He was always so pleased with the thought of a thing that he missed the thing itself—whose possession, not its thought, is essential. Thus when the trial came, it found him no true parent.

The youth of course could not be received either as clean-handed or as repentant. But love is at the heart of every right way, and essential forgiveness at the heart of every true treatment of the sinner. That the father should not have longed above all things for his son’s repentance, that he should not have met even a seeming return, that he should have nourished resentment because the youth had sinned against his family, that he should think how to make him feel his scorn most keenly—this made the father a kind of paternal Satan who sat watching by the repose of the most Christian, because most loving, most forgiving, most self-forgetting mother. While she slept in the peace of a mother’s love, he sat stirring up in himself fresh whirlwinds of indignation.