ns," said the Professor, "and then
join our friend George below,--with your permission, Madame? He is but a
fisher for the oyster, but I find in him a man of many facts."

When he had mounted to his chamber and secured his prey in a jar,
however, he did not return to George Cathcart, but stood irresolute, his
hands clasped behind his back, the shiny boatman's hat he wore pulled
over his eyes.

Twelve years ago the poor Frenchman and his son had planned this coming
to the sea: the boy used to get into his father's bed by dawn to talk it
over snugly. It came to be their grand scheme and hope for the future;
for neither the father nor little Tom had intellects of a high achieving
order. Jacobus had never, I suppose, considered whether his son had
genius or not, or what he was to do in the world: to get the boy out of
the poisonous city, to see his first look at the ocean, to watch the
sturdy little rogue fight the breakers, fish, swim, net for crabs, was
about the highest pleasure which the simple old man had ever pictured
for them. Now the holiday had come for him; and Tom----

He walked about the room, glancing unsteadily from side to side, as if
in search of something lost. The sick, intolerable loneliness of those
first days after Tom died came back to him.

"_Mon fils! mon fils!_" he muttered once, holding his hand to his side.

It gave him actual pain to breathe just then; but his eyes were dry. He
never had cried for Tom as his mother did,--never named him to her; she
thought he had forgotten. The fancy seized him, that, now that he was
here, if Tom cared for him, and for coming there, as he did once, he was
not far off at that moment. His sallow jaws colored at the boyish
notion, and then he laughed at it,--in a strange saturnine fashion. It
was as if another man than the simple Professor suddenly looked out
through his eyes,--a man older, more untrustworthy, weak through a
life-long doubt,--not his natural self, in a word, but the man which
years of life in dirty ways, and the creed which his father gave him,
had made of him. He looked out of the window, his fingers knitted behind
him.

"There is the sea, and I am here, but Tom is not here; he's dust and
ashes, yonder in Salem graveyard,--a heap of yellow dust, nothing
more,"--a laugh, which the foulest of French skeptics would have envied,
crossing his grim face at this fancy of the child's being yet alive and
near to him.

But the creed having asserted i