anted to round off
in this way. I gave you an education regardless of expense, which has
put you in possession of a comfortable income, at an age when many
young men are dependent. I have thus started you fairly in life, and
may claim that you should cease to be a drag upon me further. Long
engagements are proverbially unsatisfactory, and in the present case
the prospect seems interminable. What interest, pray, do you suppose
I have that I could get a living for you? Can I go up and down the
country begging people to provide for my son because he has taken it
into his head to want to get married without sufficient means?

"I do not wish to write unkindly, nothing can be farther from my real
feelings towards you, but there is often more kindness in plain
speaking than in any amount of soft words which can end in no
substantial performance. Of course, I bear in mind that you are of
age, and can therefore please yourself, but if you choose to claim the
strict letter of the law, and act without consideration for your
father's feelings, you must not be surprised if you one day find that
I have claimed a like liberty for myself.--Believe me, your
affectionate father, G. PONTIFEX."

I found this letter along with those already given and a few more which I
need not give, but throughout which the same tone prevails, and in all of
which there is the more or less obvious shake of the will near the end of
the letter. Remembering Theobald's general dumbness concerning his
father for the many years I knew him after his father's death, there was
an eloquence in the preservation of the letters and in their endorsement
"Letters from my father," which seemed to have with it some faint odour
of health and nature.

Theobald did not show his father's letter to Christina, nor, indeed, I
believe to anyone. He was by nature secretive, and had been repressed
too much and too early to be capable of railing or blowing off steam
where his father was concerned. His sense of wrong was still
inarticulate, felt as a dull dead weight ever present day by day, and if
he woke at night-time still continually present, but he hardly knew what
it was. I was about the closest friend he had, and I saw but little of
him, for I could not get on with him for long together. He said I had no
reverence; whereas I thought that I had plenty of reverence for what
deserved to be revered, but that the gods