All this while Walter had not dared to look up in Mr Paton's face. Abashed as he was, he could not bear to meet the only look which he expected to find there, the old cold unpitying look of condemnation and reproach. Even at that moment he could not help thinking that if Mr Paton had understood him better, he would not have seemed to him so utterly bad as then he must seem, with so recent an act of sin and folly to bear witness against him. He dared not look up through his eyes swimming with tears; but he had not expected the kind and gentle touch of the trembling hand that rested on his head as though it blessed him, and that smoothed again and again his dark hair, and wiped the big drops away from his cheeks. He had not expected the arm that raised him up from his kneeling position, and the fingers that pushed back his hair from his forehead, and gently bent back his head; or the pitying eyes, themselves dim, as though they were about to well over with compassion--that looked so sorrowfully, yet so kindly, into his own. He could not bear this. If Mr Paton had struck him, as he did in the first moment of overwhelming anger; if he had spurned him away, and ordered him any amount of punishment, it would have been far easier to bear than this Christian gentleness; this ready burying in pity and oblivion of the heaviest and most undeserved calamity which the master had ever undergone at the hands of man. Walter could not bear it; he flung himself on his knees again in a passion of weeping, and clasped Mr Paton's knees, uttering in broken sentences, "I can never make up for it, never repair it as long as I live." For a moment more the kind hand again rested on the boy's head, and gently smoothed his dark hair; and then Mr Paton found voice to speak, and lifting him up, and seating him upon his knee, said to him--