CHAPTER XII

A NEW THEORY OF A CERTAIN WICKED MAN


The time of the first sorrow was difficult for the boy. There was that
first hard sleep after one we love has gone--in which we must always
dream that it is not true--a sleep from which we awaken to suffer all the
shock of it again. Then came black nights when the perfect love for the
perfect father came back in all its early tenderness to cry the little boy
to sleep. Yet it went rapidly enough at last, as times of sorrow go for
the young. There even came a day when he found in a secret place of his
heart a chastened, hopeful inquiry if all might not have been for the
best. He had loved his father--there had been between them an unbreakable
bond; yet this very love had made him suffer at every thought of him while
he was living, whereas now he could love him with all tender memories and
with no poisonous misgivings about future meetings with their
humiliations. Now his father was made perfect in Heaven, and even
Grandfather Delcher--whose aloofness here he had ceased to blame--would
not refuse to meet and know him there.

Naturally, then, he turned to his grandfather in his great need for a new
idol to fill the vacant niche. Aforetime the old man in his study upstairs
had been little more than a gray shadow, a spirit of gloom, stubbornly
imprisoning another spirit that would have been kind if it could have
escaped. But the little boy drew near to him, and found him curiously