“It is a great puzzle, a great difficulty to know what to do,” he said. “Even at Cambridge, where he is surrounded by all those grave, industrious influences, Martin does not seem to me to gain in depth or in set purpose of life. And if I consent to this, he is plunged into surroundings that so much more conduce to shallowness, to indulgence of the senses. Thank God, I believe my son is pure. But he is so impressionable, so easily stirred by enjoyment into thoughtlessness, that I am very much afraid.” He got up and moved over to the window, where he stood looking out. In front the ground sloped sharply away down to the church-yard, where in the last fading light of evening the grey tower stood like a shepherd watching over its flock among the gravestones, below which rested the bodies of those entrusted in sure and certain hope to its hallowed care. Like all strong, hard-working men, Mr. Challoner was far too much occupied in the duties of his strenuous life to give much thought to death, except as to some dim, quiet friend whose hand some day he would take without fear or regret. But how terrible death could be, and how terrible it would be to him if through carelessness or biassed judgment he had chosen wrongly for one so dear to him, so peculiarly entrusted to his care. How terrible, again, would be that quiet friend if, through want of wideness in sympathy, he had tried to nip, to starve, to stifle a gift with which God had endowed his son. Then suddenly with a wave of bitterness all that he had planned in long, sweet day-dreams, years ago, for Martin filled his mind as the harsh salt-water fills a creek. He had seen him a scholar, minute, painstaking, absorbed, perfecting himself in accuracy and subtlety of mind by the study of the great classical authors. He would be a fellow of his college, and his father, so he pictured to himself, would live over again his own college-days, which perhaps were the happiest in his life, when he saw Martin seated at the high-table among the masters of learning, or in professorial gown crossing the dear familiar grass of the quadrangle to the grave grey chapel on summer afternoons when the sun made jewels of the western panes, or in winter when the soft, mellow glow of candles shone dimly by the dark oak stalls and scarcely reached to the vaulted fans of the roof.