“I am sure you would,” said Martin. Mr. Challoner’s face grew a shade paler. “Martin, I wish you to understand once and for all,” he said, “that I will be treated by you both in public and in private with ordinary respect and courtesy.” “I have already told you I was sorry I was rude to you,” said Martin, speaking very quickly and incisively, with an odd little tremor of angry fright in his voice. “You have often told me you were sorry lately,” said his father, “and almost before the words were out of your mouth I have had occasion to find fault with you for something else.” Martin gave a short, mirthless laugh. “That is quite true,” he said; “I can’t do right, it appears.” Mr. Challoner paused a moment; Martin had never before come to open words with him like this. “What do you mean by speaking to me like that?” he asked, in a voice scarcely audible. There was no answer. “I have asked you a question, Martin,” he said, his voice rising suddenly. Martin pushed back his hair with a hopeless gesture. “What answer do you expect me to give?” he asked, impatiently. “There is no answer to such a question. You get angry with me and you frighten me. I think you do it on purpose. You have frightened me into silence all my life, now you have frightened me at last into answering you. I hate anger; it makes me sick. And you have been angry with me every day since I came home for my holidays.” He sat down on a chair behind him with a sort of dull, indifferent acquiescence in whatever might happen, his face sullen, frightened, joyless. It seemed as if it could scarcely be the same radiant boy who had played Brahms an hour ago. There was a pause, and all the imprisoned longing for love in the father beat dismally at its bars, for he felt, and felt truly, that just now Martin almost hated him. It seemed terribly hard that his own daily and constant desire that Martin should grow up a useful God-fearing man, industrious and earnest, should be the bar that separated them, yet so he knew it to be. Had he been a weak, indulgent father, one who had not implanted in him the unbending, ineradicable sense of his duty towards the son whom God had given him, how sweet might have been the human relations between them. His love for his son was the very reason why he corrected him,--that and the duty attached to his own fatherhood; and when he saw him slack, lazy, or as now wanting in courtesy and respect, it was still from sheer duty that his anger sprang. And now for the first time from Martin’s own lips he heard the effect. He frightened him, on purpose, so it appeared. Was this, then, one of the hopeless, incomprehensible puzzles that God seems sometimes to set his groping children, this fight between duty and love, in which one must lose, and be vanquished. It seemed to him cruelly hard if this was so.