all that.

"Paul!"

"Well?" I said.

Confused with the rose-color blushes: "I forgot," she murmured, "what I
was going to say."

No, she had not forgotten it! Her face was eloquent; only she cannot
talk with that fluency with which she can look beautiful and sigh.
Especially when she would express anything of deep feeling, she has a
way of brushing a speck of dust from my right shoulder, and letting her
hand rest there a moment, that tells me worlds, but would not go for
much, I admit, on a smart female rostrum.

But "Paul!" that voice creeps to me at all times, for counsel, for
sympathy; comes impulsively, that is the best of it--comes ever
impulsively. I do not know why I am so blessed among my fellows! Just
as the lad comes to me--he, too, of the highest breeding. I never saw
a look of wonder or shrinking on his face; and once, in an illness that
he had he clung to me, cried for me, even above his mother.

I gave my heart to him then. When a sick child, with a mother like
Vesty, turns and clings to one--well, it is like to set one up.

He quotes me, refers to me, defends me, apes all my mannerisms, and
struts with them proudly as clear legal type and documentary evidence.

He has my name, Gurdon "Paul," with the rest: he is my heir. Handsome,
stalwart, as our race has notably been; loving, generous, fearless, all
that the world can give him will be his besides; tutors, splendors,
wide, luxurious travel, the entrance to glittering courts--only, God
grant that he may find just the Basin at last!--the true, the pitiful,
the pure of heart: that he may come up to the stature of his father,
who knew but one plain path, and that the royal one; who, in the battle
with fear and death, was greater than the storm.

So, often in rich and high cathedrals with Vesty by my side, the organ
has but to peal forth plaintively, and those stately, emblematic
windows fade away to others, broken, swaying in the wind, and the roar
of the tides comes in, and high above the great clouds pass wondrously.

And I think how the Christ, painted in purple and crimson glories in
these walls, and before whose image the hosts bow down, was a poor
Basin of the Basins, in His birth and in His death; who had never a
sure pillow, and who minded all woes save His own.

And above the written scroll of the preacher I hear the old prophetic
voice, how "not many wise men after the flesh, not many mighty, not
many noble, are called." . . .