It was then with a sense of relief that made him feel ashamed, that the father, after a liberal endowment of money, saw his son sent from Liverpool, after the heartiest promises on the part of the young man to do battle with life and make himself a name and a position in the colony. "If not for my sake, Cyril, for your mother's," the father had said, as he held his son's hand upon the deck of the Great Central liner. "Depend upon me this time, father," was the earnest reply, and Cyril went his way across the sea, fully believing in himself that his wild oats were sown, and that now he was about to make a position of substantial basis for himself. It was a strange thing, and as if a curious kind of clairvoyance made him prophetic, for the Rev Eli Mallow went home, and that evening busied himself over his next Sunday's sermon, involuntarily choosing the parable of the Prodigal Son, and not waking up to the fact of what he had done till he sat there in his study reading the manuscript over by the light of his shaded lamp. "Give me the portion of goods that falleth to me," he muttered in a low voice, as, with the manuscript in his hand, he sat gazing straight before him into the darker part of the room, and then became silent. "And took his journey into a far country," he muttered again, in the same dreamy abstracted manner, and then there was a longer pause, followed by a deep sigh. The Rev Eli Mallow rose slowly from his seat, and, with an agonised look in his face, walked up and down the room for some time before sinking back into his chair. "And there wasted his substance with riotous living." It did not seem to be his voice that spoke in the silence of that room; but he knew it was his that exclaimed piteously as the king of old--"Ah, Cyril, my son, my son!" Again there was absolute silence in that room, till, quoting once more from the parable which he had made the subject of his discourse, the Rector said softly-- "Father, I have sinned against heaven and before thee, and am no more worthy to be called thy son." "Yes, and I should forgive him," he continued, after a pause. "I do try to practise as I preach. Poor Cyril! poor wilful boy. I pray heaven that my thoughts have been doing thee wrong." There was a gentle smile upon his lips then as he took the manuscript of his sermon and tore it up into very small pieces before consigning it to the waste-paper basket. "No," he said, "I must not preach a sermon such as that: it is too prophetic of my own position with my sons;" and as we know this prodigal did return penniless, having worked his way back in a merchant brig, to present himself one day at the rectory in tarry canvas trousers, with blackened horny hands and a reckless defiant look in his eyes that startled the quiet people of the place.