His voice choked. Stooping down, he kissed the boy; then, lightly as a man of twenty, he swung over the sill and let himself down to the pipe below. * * * * * Dad halted in his long, nervous stride; turned and looked back. He had reached the highest ground in the lowland region; the top of a low, rolling hillock. Five miles away, in the valley, lay Ideala, the town he had quitted less than an hour and a half earlier. Under the flood of summer moonlight it lay, it’s ugly lines almost beautiful in the soft radiance. Dad gazed long and earnestly at the town that had been his home since babyhood; the town whose foremost merchant and leading citizen he had once been; the town that had laughingly witnessed his disgrace and had for fourteen miserable years been the scene of his daily degradation. He looked back at the place with much the feeling wherewith a released soul might view the twisted and crippled body that had so long been its prison-house. The disgrace, the sneers, the shame, dulled by liquor--all were things of the past. Ahead--somewhere to the southward--lay a new world, a new career, a new chance under a new name. The shackles had been struck away. The convict was free. Dad’s keen eyes traced the bulk of a big house on a rise of ground at the town’s northern end. In a room of that house a boy was lying awake, praying for the good fortune of his grandfather. A boy--the only being on earth who loved James Brinton and whom James Brinton loved. Unwitting his own quick impulse, the man fell heavily to his knees, gripped his hands tight across his chest, and stared up into the moon-illumined sky. “God bless him and keep him!” he muttered incoherently. “God bless my little boy and make me halfway the man he thinks I am!” A spasm as of physical pain seized and shook the kneeling man. The very depths were stirred. Something to which he had long been a stranger possessed and mastered him. His eyes still upraised, the white moon glare beating upon his face, he spoke aloud--spoke as though addressing a visible friend, not an unseen God. “You’ve lifted me out of the mire,” he breathed. “You have shown me the light after all these black years. You have given me the chance to strike for this country that You made free and great. Make my deeds thank You as my words can’t!” The voice ceased; then continued once more, firm yet vibrant with mighty emotion: “You have made good Your promise that ‘a little child shall lead them.’ A child has been Your instrument in starting me in the right direction. Keep me on that road, nor let my grosser self triumph over my manhood again. I offer my life to You--it is all I have to offer in atonement. Make it clean and strong as once it was. Give me the chance to lay it on Your altar as a sacrifice to liberty and patriotism. Oh, teach me to deserve the chance that has come to me this night!”