self, John, how he clings to
you--you who are only a cousin; he knows that, yet he insists upon Uncle
John, the one man who belongs to him, and looks up to you, and thinks
nothing of any of us in comparison. I like it! I like it!" cried Elinor,
dashing the tears from her eyes. "I am not jealous: but fancy what it
would be with the--other, the real, the---- I cannot, cannot, say the
word; yes, the father. If it is so with you, what would it be with him?"

John listened with his head bent down, leaning on his hand: every word
went to his heart. Yes, he was nothing but a cousin, it was true. The
boy did not belong to him, was nothing to him. If the father stepped in,
the real father, the man of whom Philip had never heard, in all the
glory of his natural rights and the novelty and wonder of his existence,
how different would that be from any feeling that could be raised by a
cousin, an uncle, with whom the boy had played all his life! No doubt it
was true: and Phil Compton would probably charm the inexperienced boy
with his handsome, disreputable grace, and the unknown ways of the man
of the world. And yet, he thought to himself, there is a perspicacity
about children which is not always present in a man. Philip had no
precocious instincts to be tempted by his father's habits; he had the
true sight of a boy trained amid everything that was noble and pure.
Would it indeed be more dangerous now, when the boy was a boy, with all
those safeguards of nature, than when he was a man? John kept his mind
to this question with the firmness of a trained intelligence, not
letting himself go off into other matters, or pausing to feel the sting
that was in Elinor's words, the reminder that though he had been so
much, he was still nothing to the family to whom he had consecrated so
much of his life, so much now of his thoughts.

"I do not think I agree with you, Elinor," he said at last. "I think it
would have been better had he always known that his father lived, and
who he was, and what family he belonged to; that is not to say that you
were to thrust him into his father's arms. And I think now that, though
we cannot redeem the past, it should be done as soon as possible, and
that he should know before he goes to school. I think the effect will be
less now than if the discovery bursts upon him when he is a young man,
when he finds, perhaps, as may well be, that his position and all his
prospects are changed in a moment, when he may be