t, what good did it do them to
slander for slander's sake? And the suspicion lingered; for, if it was
not true, what they said about his father and mother, what was it that
was true? He felt that there was something in their past, something that
had never entirely disappeared, something that still embittered the
existence of both of them, something that was perhaps the cause of their
irreconcilable discord.

And the boy felt this so deeply, in the seriousness that had come with
his new-found knowledge, that once, when he was alone with his father,
he climbed on his knees and simply asked him to tell him what it was. He
was a child, for he still sat on his father's knee, and yet he was
already a sturdy boy, though short for his years; and, however serious
he might be, he still had the soft bloom of his childhood on his cheeks
and on his soul. True, his father was beginning to ask:

"Aren't you too big, my boy, to sit on your father's knee?"

But he himself did not think that he was too big yet. Seriousness and
extreme childishness, manhood and boyhood were mingled in him; and,
though he was a little man, he was also still a boy; though he was
serious, he still remained a child.

He sat on his father's knees and asked him, gravely, to tell him what
was true, if the slanders which people spoke were not true; for he felt
that there was something. And he read in his father's eyes that he must
not ask; and his father answered that he was still too young for his
father to discuss everything with him. Then he fell silent, did not
insist; but the suspicion never left him and he now knew for certain
that there was something, because his father had told him that he was
too young to discuss things with him. And so the boy became serious;
and, when Van der Welcke came home to dinner from the club, he no longer
found his cheerful Addie, who could talk so brightly and fill up the gap
between him and Constance with his pleasant, boyish talk. The boy sat in
silence, ate in silence, with his young soul full of suspicion, full of
silent questionings as to what it really was, if the slanders which
people uttered were not true. He loved them so fondly, with that love of
his; and it made him profoundly sad that he did not know that thing of
the past, because, for want of that knowledge, he was no longer living
their life. He now wished that he was older, so as to be able to live
their life and have the right to know. And he weighed what h