her," said Henri, "you and I are different; and I can understand
that you, an old man, in your great goodness and transcendental sense of
duty, cannot understand how I feel and think and act. Still, I do not
believe that I have corrupted Addie and I am convinced that it was a
good impulse that suggested to Constance and me to tell our child about
our past at once and not to wait until he was a year or two older. Tell
me if you think that he looks like a child whose imagination has been
defiled. Tell me if you do not think, on the contrary, that he is a
strong-minded boy who suffered from those slanders, when they reached
him, simply because he did not know the truth, and who now, knowing the
truth, loves both his parents with his clear, candid soul and is no
longer in doubt, but knows."

The old man slowly shook his head with the tall, ivory forehead, while
his gnarled hands trembled:

"Henri, you can thank God if your child, whose purity you have put to so
severe a test, emerges from that test unstained."

Van der Welcke was silent, out of respect. He felt himself,
notwithstanding his love, so far removed from his father that his heart
was wrung and he thought:

"Will Addie ever, ever be so far removed from me?..."

CHAPTER XXXIV

The old man often reverted to that conversation:

"Henri, can you imagine me, your father, speaking to you, when you were
thirteen, about a sin, a crime I had committed?"

No, Van der Welcke could never have imagined it! He was sorry now that
he had told his father so much, seeing how shocked the old man was. And,
though he tried to find soothing words, in order to calm his father
after that shock, still everything that he said sounded too cynical, too
modern, too flippant almost; and he no longer answered, but preferred to
avoid the subject, when the old man returned to it daily, shaking his
head and making his comments. And Van der Welcke was obliged to smile
when his father often closed those comments with the remark:

"Don't let your mother know anything about it."

No, he did not tell his mother, because his father ordered him to leave
his mother out of all this cynical philosophy and atheistical lack of
principle, because his father thought that it would hurt her, his wife,
whom he had always kept secluded from all knowledge of the outside
world, until the scandal in Rome had come as a shock to both of them.
And even then, in the years that followed, he had always hid