"Never his name again.... Never his name again." The actual sound of the words echoing back to him lifted him up as though out of very deep water. Then he was aware, as one is in the first clear moment after a great shock, of a number of things at the same time. He hated his son because his son had disgraced him and his name for ever. He loved his son, never before so deeply and so dearly as now. He was his only son, and there was none other. His son had gone off with the daughter of the worst publican in the place, and so had shamed him before them all. Falk (he arrived in his mind suddenly at the name with a little shiver that hurt horribly) would never be there any more, would never be about the house, would never laugh and be angry and be funny any more. (Behind this thought was a long train of pictures of Falk as a boy, as a baby, as a child, pictures that he kept back with a great gesture of the will.) In the town they would all be talking, they were talking already. They must be stopped from talking; they must not know. He must lie; they must all lie. But how could they be stopped from knowing when he had gone off with the publican's daughter? They would all know.... They would laugh...They would laugh. He would not be able to go down the street without their laughter. Dimly on that came a larger question. What had happened lately so that his whole life had changed? He had been feeling it now for weeks, long before this terrible blow had fallen, as though he were surrounded by enemies and mockers and men who wished him ill. Men who wished him ill! Wished HIM ill! He who had never done any one harm in all his life, who had only wanted the happiness of others and the good of the place in which he was, and the Glory of God! God!...His thoughts leapt across a vast gulf. What was God about, to allow this disaster to fall upon him? When he had served God so faithfully and had had no thought but for His grandeur? He was in a new world now, where the rivers, the mountains, the roads, the cities were new. For years everything had gone well with him, and then, suddenly, at the lifting of a finger, all had been ill.... Through the mist of his thoughts, gradually, like the sun in his strength, his anger had been rising. Now it flamed forth. At the first it had been personal anger because his son had betrayed and deceived him--but now, for a time, Falk was almost forgotten. He would show them. They would laugh at him, would they? They would point at him, would they, as the man whose son had run away with an innkeeper's daughter? Well, let them point. They would plot to take the power from his hands, to reduce him to impotence, to make him of no account in the place where he had ruled for years. He had no doubt, now that he saw farther into it, that they had persuaded Falk to run away with that girl. It was the sort of weapon that they would be likely to use, the sort of weapon that that man, Ronder....