The Doctor shook his head and a sudden pain twisted his thin, studious face. "Oh no, no," he said, "I was never like that. I wish to God I had been. But it was to make Peter what he is that I've worked night and day. He's my idea of a man. He's doing all the things that I'd like to have done. He's me as I might have been if I'd had any luck--any sort of a chance. Do I regret it? Am I jealous? No; because if I hadn't lived such an opposite life I mightn't have desired to give my boy all this." He waved his hand towards the spires that rose in all their significance out of the town away below. And then, with intense eagerness and a ring of wistfulness in his voice that brought tears to his wife's eyes, he bent towards her. "Do you think he realizes this, Mary? Does Graham ever stop to think how hard I've worked to put him in Wall Street? Does Belle ever wonder what it's cost me in youth and health to give her so much more than she needs? I'm--I'm a queer, wordless, foolishly shy man. Old since the time they all three began to think and use their eyes,--necessarily concentrated and aloof away in that laboratory of mine, and--and sometimes I wonder whether my children know me and understand and make allowances. Do they, Mary, my dear one? Do they?" "Yes, my man, my brave and splendid man," she replied, "they do, they do!" And in saying this she deliberately lied,--out of her great and steadfast love for this man of hers she lied. No one knew so well as she did that the father of her children might almost as well be a mere distant relation who lived in their home for reasons of convenience and allotted money to their requirements at the proper time. No one knew so well as she did that Hunter Guthrie's tragic lack of childhood had dried out of his nature the power of understanding children. Never having been a child in any sense of the word--never having known the inexpressible joy of a mother's love--remembering nothing but a father who was either working hard or tired out--he was unable to conceive what his own children needed in addition to all that they got hourly from his wife and from his own work. It had always seemed to him that in the possession of a mother they had everything good that God could give them. It seemed to him that his own part was performed by providing for their needs. No man desired to be the father of sons and daughters more than he did. No man was prouder in the possession of them than he was and had always been. To hear the patter of their little feet about his house sent him to his work with that sense of religion of which Carlyle wrote. To watch them shaping from childhood into youth was the most satisfactory and beautiful thing in his life. To be able, year after year, to do better and still better for them was his best and biggest reward--far greater and more glorious than the distinction he earned for himself and the international reputation that increased with each of his discoveries. And when, six months after