ou ill on my hands it's my own fault. I
take the responsibility for everything that has happened since the very
first moment we met. Remember that, my young fellow! I took the law into
my own hands, and you I took into my own house for better or worse. You
were worse then, remember, and yet I took you in! Is it not strange that
your asthma has entirely left you under my roof? Does it not lead you to
believe in me, my young fellow--to trust me perhaps more than you have
done?"

It did not. Pocket was not going to lie about that; he held his tongue
stubbornly instead. He still believed in his own explanation, derived
from one of his many doctors, and moreover already mentioned to this one,
of the sudden cessation of his chronic complaint. He hated Baumgartner
for forgetting that, and pretending for a moment to take any credit to
himself. That again was not worthy of so cool and keen a brain, much less
of the candid character with which Pocket had supposed himself to be
dealing. The very young are pathetically apt to see their own virtues in
those whom they trust at all; but the schoolboy's faith in Dr. Baumgartner
had been shattered to its base; and now (as sure a symptom of his youth)
he could see no virtue at all.

"You must trust me again," said Baumgartner, as though he knew what he had
forfeited. "I know what will do you good."

"What?" asked Pocket, out of mere incredulous curiosity.

"Fresh air; some exercise; a glimpse of the beautiful town we live in,
before another soul is about, before the sun itself is up!"

Pocket hardly knew what made him shudder at the proposition. It might
have been the poignant picture of that other early morning, which came
before him in a scorching flash. But there was something also in the way
the doctor was bending over him in bed, holding his pipe nearer still, so
that the two dreadful faces seemed of equal size. And Baumgartner's had
become a dreadful face in the boy's eyes now; there was none among those
cruel waxworks to match it in cold intellectual cruelty; and its smile--its
new and strange smile it must have been that made him shudder and shake
his head.

"But, my young fellow," urged the doctor, "it will do you so much good.
And not a soul will see us so early, early in the morning!"

Again that insinuating smile inspired a horror of which the boy himself
could have offered no satisfactory explanation, especially as there was
much to commend the proposal