re: what you do affects me vitally. You will take no step
that is not intimate with my happiness, or my misery. And I have had
great disappointments, my son."

So far it was well. Richard loved his father, and even in his frenzied
state he could not without emotion hear him thus speak.

Unhappily, the baronet, who by some fatality never could see when he was
winning the battle, thought proper in his wisdom to water the dryness
of his sermon with a little jocoseness, on the subject of young
men fancying themselves in love, and, when they were raw and green,
absolutely wanting to be--that most awful thing, which the wisest and
strongest of men undertake in hesitation and after self-mortification
and penance--married! He sketched the Foolish Young Fellow--the object
of general ridicule and covert contempt. He sketched the Woman--the
strange thing made in our image, and with all our faculties--passing to
the rule of one who in taking her proved that he could not rule himself,
and had no knowledge of her save as a choice morsel which he would burn
the whole world, and himself in the bargain, to possess. He harped upon
the Foolish Young Fellow, till the foolish young fellow felt his skin
tingle and was half suffocated with shame and rage.

After this, the baronet might be as wise as he pleased: he had quite
undone his work. He might analyze Love and anatomize Woman. He might
accord to her her due position, and paint her fair: he might be shrewd,
jocose, gentle, pathetic, wonderfully wise: he spoke to deaf ears.

Closing his sermon with the question, softly uttered: "Have you anything
to tell me, Richard?" and hoping for a confession, and a thorough
re-establishment of confidence, the callous answer struck him cold: "I
have not."

The baronet relapsed in his chair, and made diagrams of his fingers.

Richard turned his back on further dialogue by going to the window. In
the section of sky over the street twinkled two or three stars; shining
faintly, feeling the moon. The moon was rising: the woods were lifting
up to her: his star of the woods would be there. A bed of moss set about
flowers in a basket under him breathed to his nostril of the woodland
keenly, and filled him with delirious longing.

A succession of hard sighs brought his father's hand on his shoulder.

"You have nothing you could say to me, my son? Tell me, Richard!
Remember, there is no home for the soul where dwells a shadow of
untruth!"

"Nothing at