ow nothing of the facts.
You love anything out of the way, anything queer, that doesn't often
happen, and so you get excited over this. It's useless, my dear man;
you have hurt me, but you will never upset me. As soon as you stop this
ridiculous scene we will finish our dinner. Spread this scandal; add
to it. I'm too old to mind such nonsense. I cannot help my father's
disgrace, on the one hand; nor, on the other, will I have anything to do
with his blackguard of a son."

So the secret was given to the world. Agnes might colour at his speech;
Herbert might calculate the effect of it on the entries for Dunwood
House; but he cared for none of these things. Thank God! he was withered
up at last.

"Please listen again," resumed Ansell. "Please correct two slight
mistakes: firstly, Stephen is one of the greatest people I have ever
met; secondly, he's not your father's son. He's the son of your mother."

It was Rickie, not Ansell, who was carried from the hall, and it was
Herbert who pronounced the blessing--

"Benedicto benedicatur."

A profound stillness succeeded the storm, and the boys, slipping away
from their meal, told the news to the rest of the school, or put it in
the letters they were writing home.

XXVIII

The soul has her own currency. She mints her spiritual coinage and
stamps it with the image of some beloved face. With it she pays her
debts, with it she reckons, saying, "This man has worth, this man is
worthless." And in time she forgets its origin; it seems to her to be a
thing unalterable, divine. But the soul can also have her bankruptcies.

Perhaps she will be the richer in the end. In her agony she learns to
reckon clearly. Fair as the coin may have been, it was not accurate; and
though she knew it not, there were treasures that it could not buy. The
face, however beloved, was mortal, and as liable as the soul herself to
err. We do but shift responsibility by making a standard of the dead.

There is, indeed, another coinage that bears on it not man's image but
God's. It is incorruptible, and the soul may trust it safely; it will
serve her beyond the stars. But it cannot give us friends, or the
embrace of a lover, or the touch of children, for with our fellow
mortals it has no concern. It cannot even give the joys we call
trivial--fine weather, the pleasures of meat and drink, bathing and the
hot sand afterwards, running, dreamless sleep. Have we learnt the true
discipline of a bankruptcy if