How could he take his son to his bosom as he was? he asked—but did not ask how he was to draw him to repentance! He did not think of the tender entreaty with which, by the mouths of his prophets, God pleads with his people to come back to him. If the father, instead of holding out his arms to the child he would entice to his bosom, folds them on that bosom and turns his back—expectant it may be, but giving no sign of expectancy, the child will hardly suppose him longing to be reconciled. No doubt there are times when and children with whom any show of affection is not only useless but injurious, tending merely to increase their self-importance. In such case the child should not see the parent at all. But it was the opposite reason that made it better Cornelius should not yet see his father—he would have treated him so that he would only have hated him.

For a father not to forgive is in truth far worse than for a son to need forgiveness. Such a father, as well as the son, will of course go from bad to worse unless he repents. The shifty, ungenerous spirit of compromise awoke in Raymount. He would be very good, very gentle, very kind to everyone else in the house. He would walk softly—he was not ready to walk uprightly—but he would postpone his forgiveness. He knew his feelings toward Corney were wearing out the heart of his wife—but he would not yield. There was little Mark, however. He would make more of him, know him better, and make the child know him better.

He went to see how his wife was. Finding that she was a trifle better, he found himself annoyed. In the selfishness of his misery, he looked upon her happiness at having her worthless son home as a lack of sympathy with himself. He did not allude to Cornelius, but said he was going for a walk, and went to find Mark—with a vague hope of consolation in the child who had clung to him so confidently in the night. He had forgotten it was not to him that the boy’s soul had clung, but to the father of both of them.

Mark was in the nursery, as the children’s room was still called. When Mark heard his father’s step, he bounded to meet him. When his sweet moonlit rather than sunshiny face appeared at the door, the gloom on his father’s yielded a little. The gleam of a momentary smile broke over it, and he said kindly:

“Come, Mark, I want you to go for a walk with me.”

He was not doing the right thing in taking him out, but he was not thinking of that just now. He ought to have known that the boy was still too weak for anything to be called a walk. Neither was the weather fit for his going out. But absorbed in his own trouble, the father did not think of his weakness, and Hester was not there to object. So away they went. Mark was delighted to be his father’s companion, never doubting all was right, and forgot his weakness as entirely as his father did.