y
of the ties by which, unless we are born of our fathers and mothers for
nothing more than the animals are, we are bound to them in all the
things of life, in duty and in love transcending every question of
interest and happiness. The parents' duty to the children is obvious and
plain, but the child's duty to its parents is something subtler and more
spiritual. It is to be more delicately, more religiously, regarded. No
one, without impiety, can meddle with it from the outside, or interfere
in its fulfilment. This and much more I said to my wife when we came to
talk the matter over after Tedham left us. Above all, I urged something
that came to me so forcibly at the moment that I said I had always
thought it, and perhaps I really believed that I had. "Why should we try
to shield people from fate? Isn't that always wrong? One is fated to be
born the child of a certain father, and one can no more escape the
consequences of his father's misdeeds than the doer himself can. Perhaps
the pain and the shame come from the wish and the attempt to do so, more
than from the fact itself. The sins of the fathers shall be visited upon
the children. But the children are innocent of evil, and this visitation
must be for their good, and will be, if they bear it willingly."

"Well, don't try to be that sort of blessing to _your_ children, Basil,"
said my wife, personalizing the case, as a woman must.

After that we tried to account to each other for having consented to do
what Tedham asked us. Perhaps we accused each other somewhat for doing
it.

"I didn't know, my dear, but you were going to ask him to come and stay
with us," I said.

"I did want to," she replied. "It seemed so forlorn, letting him go out
into the night, and find a place for himself, when we could just as well
have let him stay as not. Why shouldn't we have offered him a bed for
the night, as we would any other acquaintance?"

"Well, you must allow that the circumstances were peculiar!"

"But if he was sentenced to pay a certain penalty, and has paid it, why,
as he said, shouldn't we stop punishing him?"

"I suppose we can't. There seems to be an instinctive demand for eternal
perdition, for hell, in the human heart," I suggested.

"Well, then, I believe that your instinct, Basil--"

"Oh, _I_ don't claim it, exclusively!"

"Is a survival of savagery, and the sooner we get rid of it the better.
How queer he seems. It is the old Tedham, but all faded in--or out