And now, for a moment, all his pride and anger were gone, and he could think of nothing but his love for his son. He had an impulse that almost moved him to hurry home, to take the next train up to London, to find Falk, to take him in his arms and forgive him. He saw again and again that last meeting that they had had, when Falk had kissed him. He knew now what that had meant. After all, the boy was right. He had been in the wrong to have kept him here, doing nothing. It was fine of the boy to take things into his own hands, to show his independence and to fight for his own individuality. It was what he himself would have done if--then the thought of Annie Hogg cut across his tenderness and behind Annie her father, that fat, smiling, red-faced scoundrel, the worst villain in the town. At the sudden realisation that there was now a link between himself and that man, and that that link had been forged by his own son, tenderness and affection fled. He could only entertain one emotion at a time, and immediately he was swept into such a fury that he stopped in his walk, lifted his head, and cursed Falk. For that he would never forgive him, for the public shame and disgrace that he had brought upon the Brandon name, upon his mother and his sister, upon the Cathedral, upon all authority and discipline and seemliness in the town. He suffered then the deepest agony that perhaps in all his life he had ever known. There was no one there to see. He sank down upon the wooden coping that protruded from the old wall and hid his face in his hands as though he were too deeply ashamed to encounter even the dim faces of the old wooden figures. There was a stir in the room; the little door opened and closed; the bird, with a flutter of wings, flew back to its corner. Brandon looked up and saw a faint shadow of a man. He rose and took some steps towards the door, then he stopped because be saw that the man was Davray the painter. He had never spoken to this man, but be had hated everything that he had ever heard about him. In the first place, to be an artist was, in the Archdeacon's mind, synonymous with being a loose liver and an atheist. Then this fellow was, as all the town knew, a drunkard, an idler, a dissolute waster who had brought nothing upon Polchester but disgrace. Had Brandon had his way he would, long ago, have had him publicly expelled and forbidden ever to return. The thought that this man should be in the Cathedral at all was shocking to him and, in his present mood, quite intolerable. He saw, dim though the light was, that the man was drunk now. Davray lurched forward a step, then said huskily: "Well, so your fine son's run away with Hogg's pretty daughter."