crippled creature.

He had not meant to be a bad father, but he had not felt like a father
at all. He had supplied doctors and nurses and luxuries, but he had
shrunk from the mere thought of the boy and had buried himself in his
own misery. The first time after a year's absence he returned to
Misselthwaite and the small miserable looking thing languidly and
indifferently lifted to his face the great gray eyes with black lashes
round them, so like and yet so horribly unlike the happy eyes he had
adored, he could not bear the sight of them and turned away pale as
death. After that he scarcely ever saw him except when he was asleep,
and all he knew of him was that he was a confirmed invalid, with a
vicious, hysterical, half-insane temper. He could only be kept from
furies dangerous to himself by being given his own way in every detail.

All this was not an uplifting thing to recall, but as the train whirled
him through mountain passes and golden plains the man who was "coming
alive" began to think in a new way and he thought long and steadily and
deeply.

"Perhaps I have been all wrong for ten years," he said to himself.
"Ten years is a long time. It may be too late to do anything--quite
too late. What have I been thinking of!"

Of course this was the wrong Magic--to begin by saying "too late." Even
Colin could have told him that. But he knew nothing of Magic--either
black or white. This he had yet to learn. He wondered if Susan
Sowerby had taken courage and written to him only because the motherly
creature had realized that the boy was much worse--was fatally ill. If
he had not been under the spell of the curious calmness which had taken
possession of him he would have been more wretched than ever. But the
calm had brought a sort of courage and hope with it. Instead of giving
way to thoughts of the worst he actually found he was trying to believe
in better things.

"Could it be possible that she sees that I may be able to do him good
and control him?" he thought. "I will go and see her on my way to
Misselthwaite."

But when on his way across the moor he stopped the carriage at the
cottage, seven or eight children who were playing about gathered in a
group and bobbing seven or eight friendly and polite curtsies told him
that their mother had gone to the other side of the moor early in the
morning to help a woman who had a new baby. "Our Dickon," they
volunteered, was over at the Manor working in one of