you hear me?"

Sam looked out of the window. "I shall go, I think, to-morrow," he
said thoughtfully.

Samuel Wright stared at his wife in dumfounded silence. When he got
his breath, he said in awful tones, "Eliza, he defies me! A child of
mine, and lost to all sense of duty! I cannot understand it;--unless
such things have happened in _your_ family?" he ended with sudden
suspicion,

"Never!" protested the poor mother; "but Samuel, my dear--Sammy, my
darling--"

The senior warden raised a majestic hand. "Silence, if you please,
Eliza." Then he thrust his right hand into his bosom, rested his left
fist on the marble-topped centre-table, and advanced one foot.
Standing thus, he began to tell his son what he thought of him, and as
he proceeded his anger mounted, he forgot his periods and his
attitudes, and his voice grew shrill and mean. But, alas, he could not
tell the boy all that he thought; he could not tell him of his high
ambitions for him, of his pitiful desire for his love, of his
anguished fear lest he might be unhappy, or foolish, or bad. These
thoughts the senior warden had never known how to speak. Instead, he
detailed his grievances and his disappointments; he told Sam with
ruthless candor what the world called his conduct: dishonest, idiotic,
ungrateful. He had a terrifying string of adjectives, and through them
all the boy looked out of the window. Once, at a particularly
impassioned period, he glanced at his father with interest; that
phrase would be fine in a play, he reflected. Then he looked out of