the stairs, sat down
with a palpitating heart. If, because of anything her brother said to
him, he went away---

Lapidoth had some sense of what was being prepared for him in his son's
mind, but he was beginning to adjust himself to the situation and find
a point of view that would give him a cool superiority to any attempt
at humiliating him. This haggard son, speaking as from a sepulchre, had
the incongruity which selfish levity learns to see in suffering, and
until the unrelenting pincers of disease clutch its own flesh. Whatever
preaching he might deliver must be taken for a matter of course, as a
man finding shelter from hail in an open cathedral might take a little
religious howling that happened to be going on there.

Lapidoth was not born with this sort of callousness: he had achieved it.

"This home that we have here," Ezra began, "is maintained partly by the
generosity of a beloved friend who supports me, and partly by the
labors of my sister, who supports herself. While we have a home we will
not shut you out from it. We will not cast you out to the mercy of your
vices. For you are our father, and though you have broken your bond, we
acknowledge ours. But I will never trust you. You absconded with money,
leaving your debts unpaid; you forsook my mother; you robbed her of her
little child and broke her heart; you have become a gambler, and where
shame and conscience were there sits an insatiable desire; you were
ready to sell my sister--you had sold her, but the price was denied
you. The man who has done these things must never expect to be trusted
any more. We will share our food with you--you shall have a bed, and
clothing. We will do this duty to you, because you are our father. But
you will never be trusted. You are an evil man: you made the misery of
our mother. That such a man is our father is a brand on our flesh which
will not cease smarting. But the Eternal has laid it upon us; and
though human justice were to flog you for crimes, and your body fell
helpless before the public scorn, we would still say, 'This is our
father; make way, that we may carry him out of your sight.'"

Lapidoth, in adjusting himself to what was coming, had not been able to
foresee the exact intensity of the lightning or the exact course it
would take--that it would not fall outside his frame but through it. He
could not foresee what was so new to him as this voice from the soul of
his son. It touched that spring of hysteric