r. Seeing his anguish, I
had refrained; but when two or three days had passed, and nothing was
done or said, I began to hope that the parting might not be deferred
even a few weeks; for I believe the father suffered, and with him the
child, enough each day to wipe out years of transgression.

It was impossible to hide from Sigmund that some great grief threatened,
or had already descended upon his father, and therefore upon him. The
child's sympathy with the man's nature, with every mood and feeling--I
had almost said his intuitive understanding of his father's very
thoughts, was too keen and intense to be hoodwinked or turned aside. He
did not behave like other children, of course--_versteht sich_, as Eugen
said to me with a dreary smile. He did not hang about his father's neck,
imploring to hear what was the matter; he did not weep or wail, or make
complaints. After that first moment of uncontrollable pain and anxiety,
when he had gone into the room whose door was closed upon him, and
in which Eugen had not told him all that was coming, he displayed
no violent emotion; but he did what was to Eugen and me much more
heart-breaking--brooded silently; grew every day wanner and thinner, and
spent long intervals in watching his father, with eyes which nothing
could divert and nothing deceive. If Eugen tried to be cheerful, to put
on a little gayety of demeanor which he did not feel in his heart,
Sigmund made no answer to it, but continued to look with the same
solemn, large and mournful gaze.

His father's grief was eating into his own young heart. He asked not
what it was; but both Eugen and I knew that in time, if it went on
long enough, he would die of it. The picture, "Innocence Dying of
Blood-stain," which Hawthorne has suggested to us, may have its
prototypes and counterparts in unsuspected places. Here was one. Nor did
Sigmund, as some others, children both of larger and smaller growth,
might have done, turn to me and ask me to tell him the meaning of the
sad change which had crept silently and darkly into our lives. He
outspartaned the Spartan in many ways. His father had not chosen to tell
him; he would die rather than ask the meaning of the silence.

One night--when some three days had passed since the letter had come--as
Eugen and I sat alone, it struck me that I heard a weary turning over in
the little bed in the next room, and a stifled sob coming distinctly to
my ears. I lifted my head. Eugen had heard too;