The first time I saw Mr. Richards after that was in his home, the family having sent for me to come to the house for supper. Already there, and dreading to meet him, I heard him run up the steps briskly, _whistling as he came_! He called out cheerily, “Are you in there, Doctor?” It was a shock to me. I had so dreaded to meet him; had thought of him as suffering from remorse as I had suffered (had he not said with contrition that he would ask God to forgive him?); and here he was whistling, and a love song! Again I recoiled from him, and with it came a sickening sense of being alone in my misery, and of having wasted more pity on him than he deserved. I was pretty severe when we spoke of it later, but think he succeeded in mollifying me somewhat, though I began then to think that his religious talk was largely cant, and so ceased to have much patience with his asking God to forgive him. My friendliness with the family continued, but I never received him in the office after that, unless Mrs. Richards, or the boys, came with him. Later I learned a great deal of their home life which I had only divined before--learned that he was a very different man when I was there from his ordinary self; that the boys’ fondness for me, though genuine, was only a part of the reason why they were always so eager for me to come there, the other part being that Dad was always so jolly and good then, and things went so smoothly. One evening while he and his wife and I were sitting on the veranda, the boys came home, greeted us, and passed on into the house, after which their father followed them, and we heard them in earnest conversation. Soon they were talking angrily. Mrs. Richards hurried in, and shortly after, I heard a cry of distress, and then her voice calling, “Doctor, come--_come_!” Rushing in, there in the dining room I saw what nearly paralyzed me--the father, looking more like a fiend than a human being, had his younger son by the throat, while the elder boy, white with terror, stood on one side of the table, as far from his father as he could get. The mother was closing windows and doors, so that the neighbours could not hear, and was all the time beseeching the boy in jeopardy to say he did it: “Say it, Tommy, or he’ll kill you!”