With that he slipped from his father’s knee, who did not dare to detain him, and walked from the room with slow, stately step.

By now the heart of the strong, hard man was swelling with the love that was at last coming awake. He could not weep, but felt dry, torturing sobs welling up from within him that seemed as if they would kill him. He rose to see the boy safely in bed.

In the corridor he breathed more freely. Through an old window, the bright moon, shining in peace with no one to see, cast a shadow in the shape of a cross, partly on the wall and partly on the floor. Severe Protestant as Gerald Raymount was, he found himself on his knees in the passage in front of the shadow—not praying, not doing anything he knew, but under some spiritual influence known only to God.

When the something had reached its height and the passion was over and his soul was clearing of the storm that had swept through it, he rose from his knees and went up to Mark’s room, two stories higher. The moonlight was there too, and the father saw the child’s white bed glimmering like a tomb.

He drew near, but through the gray darkness it was some seconds before he could rightly see the face of his boy. For a moment—I wonder how brief a moment is enough for a death-pang to feel eternal!—for an awful moment he felt as if he had lost him, that when he left the study he had been lifted straight to the bosom of the Father to whom he had prayed!

Slow through the dusk dawned his face. He had not then been taken bodily!—yet not the less was he gone! It was assuredly a dead face! But as he gazed in a fascination of fear, his eyes grew abler to distinguish, and he saw that he breathed.

The boy seemed in his usual health, and was sleeping peacefully—dreaming pleasantly, for the ghost of a smile glinted about his just parted lips. Then upon the father—who was not, with all his hardness, devoid of imagination—came the wonder of watching a dreamer. What might be going on within that brain? Splendid visions might be gliding through the soul of the sleeper—his child, born of his body and his soul—and not one of them was open to him!

But how much nearer to him in reality was the child when awake and about the house? Even then, how much did he know of the thoughts, the loves, the imaginations, the desires, the aspirations that moved in the heart and the brain of the child? The boy was sickly—he might be taken from him before he had made any true acquaintance with him! He was just the sort of child to die young! Certainly he might see him in the other world, but the boy would have so few memories of him, so few associations with him, that it would be hard to tie the new to the old!