there was more of the father there, the father's intense, almost
violent, vitality was somehow more characteristic of the essential Morris
than face or feature.

What a happy thing it was too--here the smile of pleasure illuminated Mr.
Taynton's face again--that the boy whom he had dismissed two years before
for some petty pilfering in his own house, should have turned out such a
promising lad and should have found his way to so pleasant a berth as
that of factotum to Morris. Kindly and charitable all through and ever
eager to draw out the good in everybody and forgive the bad, Mr. Taynton
had often occasion to deplore the hardness and uncharity of a world which
remembers youthful errors and hangs them, like a mill-stone, round the
neck of the offender, and it warmed his heart and kindled his smile to
think of one case at any rate where a youthful misdemeanour was lived
down and forgotten. At the time he remembered being in doubt whether he
should not give the offender up to justice, for the pilfering, petty
though it had been, had been somewhat persistent, but he had taken the
more merciful course, and merely dismissed the boy. He had been in two
minds about it before, wondering whether it would not be better to let
Martin have a sharp lesson, but to-night he was thankful that he had not
done so. The mercy he had shown had come back to bless him also; he felt
a glow of thankfulness that the subject of his clemency had turned out so
well. Punishment often hardens the criminal, was one of his settled
convictions. But Morris--again his thoughts went back to Morris, who was
already standing on the verge of manhood, on the verge, too, he made no
doubt of married life and its joys and responsibilities. Mr. Taynton was
himself a bachelor, and the thought gave him not a moment of jealousy,
but a moment of void that ached a little at the thought of the common
human bliss which he had himself missed. How charming, too, was the girl
Madge Templeton, whom he had met, not for the first time, that evening.