“Oh, thank you, dear Mrs. Pelham. I have thought this out during many dark and terrible nights in the North Country, and I resolved that, whatever duty I owed to Onawata, my present wife, I owed a prior duty to my dear wife now gone and to our boy Paul. I am not going to allow Paul’s future to be entangled or embarrassed by association with the children of mixed blood. No one can tell how they will turn out. While I am here they will be all right, but no one knows how long I shall be with them. Sometimes I have my fears as to myself. But as to Paul, I am resolved that he is not to be handicapped nor his future imperilled by the sins and follies of his father. He is a good boy. So if you could allow him to, as you say, make his headquarters with you, it would lift an immense weight off my shoulders and relieve the situation generally more than I can say.” “Splendid! Splendid, old man!” exclaimed the delighted Colonel. “You have put it exactly as it should be put. We shall be more than delighted to have Paul stay with us. Indeed, I should feel it terribly to have to give him up completely. Nothing could be more satisfactory to us, eh, Augusta?” “I am sure it is the best arrangement all round. Paul has his own future, his own life to work out, and—and—well, I am quite sure you have done the right thing. We shall do our best for Paul. He is indeed like our own son, and a really fine fellow.” “Splendid chap! Wonderful chap! Brilliant chap! Make his mark some day if he lives,” exclaimed the Colonel, yielding to his enthusiasm for Paul, and vastly relieved over the solution of a problem that to him had presented the most painful possibilities. The Colonel’s faith in a beneficent, over-ruling Providence was appreciably strengthened by the events of the evening. CHAPTER XI The arrangement thus happily consummated had failed to take note of a very important factor necessary to its perfect adjustment, namely Paul himself. It was Paul, with the assistance of Asa, who finally settled the problem of his future. For some weeks the “big white house” continued to be the headquarters of Paul, where, through a mutual understanding between his father and Mrs. Pelham, he spent the greater part of the day. But no day passed that did not see Paul for some hours at Pine Croft in the company of his father, working up his music according to his father’s interpretation of the great masters; reciting his catechism and Bible lessons, for these his father insisted upon more keenly than upon any other; playing with his father’s paints and brushes, with now and then a word of instruction as to line or colour, composition or perspective; and struggling with his mathematics, in which Augusta frankly acknowledged that she was rather weak.