“You are a young man yet, Philip,” she faltered, “but I am an old lady now, dear, and I have seen the fruits of the intoxication you call passion. Oh, have I not, have I not? It wrecks lives, ruins prospects, breaks up homes, sets father against son, and brother against brother----” Philip would give her no chance. He was tramping across the room, and he burst out with, “You are wrong again, Auntie. You are always wrong in these matters, because you are always thinking from the particular to the general--you are always thinking of my father. What you have been calling my father's fall was really his fate. He deserved it. If he had been fit for the high destiny he aspired to--if he had been fit to be a judge, he would not have fallen. That he did fall is proof enough that he was not fit. God did not intend it. My father's aspirations were not the call of a stern vocation, they were mere poetic ambition. If he had ever by great ill-fortune lived to be made Deemster, he would have found himself out, and the island would have found him out, and you yourself would have found him out, and all the world would have been undeceived. As a poet he might have been a great man, but as a Deemster he must have been a mockery, a hypocrite, an impostor, and a sham.” Auntie Nan rose to her feet with a look of fright on her sweet old face, and something dropped with a clank on to the floor. “Oh, Philip, Philip, if I thought you could ever repeat the error----” But Philip gave her no time to finish. Tossing his disordered hair from his forehead, he swung out of the room. Being alone, he began to collect himself. Was it, in sober fact, he who had spoken like that? Of his father too? To Auntie Nan as well? He saw how it was; he had been speaking of his father, but he had been thinking of himself; he had been struggling to justify himself, to reconcile, strengthen, and fortify himself. But in doing so he had been breaking an idol, a life-long idol, his own idol and Auntie Nan's. He stumbled downstairs in a rush of remorse, and burst again into the room crying in a broken voice, “Auntie! Auntie!” But the room was empty; the lamp was turned down; the sampler was pushed aside. Something crunched under his foot, and he stooped and picked it up. It was the medallion, and it was cracked across. The accident terrified him. His skin seemed to creep. He felt as if he had trodden on his father's face. Putting the broken picture into his pocket, he turned about like a guilty man and crept silently to bed in the darkness. But the morning brought him solace for the pains of the night--it brought him a letter from Kate.