"No, Uniacke, no, for he's far away from his duty. That hideous old woman, in her degradation, in her cruelty, in her drunkenness, loved that boy, loves him still, with an intensity, a passion, a hunger, a feverish anxiety that are noble, that are great. Her hatred of me proves it. I honour her for her hatred. I respect her for it! She shows the beauty of her soul in her curses. She almost teaches me that there is indeed immortality--at least for women--by her sleepless horror of me. Her hatred, I say, is glorious, because her love shines through it. I feed her. She doesn't know it. She'd starve rather than eat my bread. She would kill me, I believe, if she didn't fancy in her vague mind, obscured by drink, that the man who had sent her boy from her might bring him back to her. For weeks she came every day--walking all the way from Drury Lane, mind you--to ask if the boy had returned. Then she endured the nightmare of my company, as I told you, while we searched in likely places for the vanished sea urchin. Jack did nothing for the support of his mother. It was she who kept him. She beat him. She cursed him. She fed him. She loved him; like an animal, perhaps, like a mother, certainly. That says all, Uniacke. It was I who sent that boy away. I must give him back to that old woman. Till I do so I can never find peace. This thing preys upon my life, eats into my heart. It's the little worm gnawing, always gnawing at me. The doctors tell me I am morbid because I am in bad health, that my bad health makes the malady in my mind. On the contrary, it is my mind that makes the malady in my body. Ah! you are wondering! You are wondering, too, whether it's not the other way! I see you are!" "I cannot deny it," Uniacke said gently. "You are wrong. You are wrong, I assure you. And surely you, a clergyman, ought to be the very man to understand me, to know how what seems a slight thing, a small selfishness, well, the inadvertence we spoke of lately, may punish the soul, may have a long and evil train of consequences. I was careless of that child, careful only of my ambition. I ground the child in the mortar of my ambition; is it not natural that I should suffer now? Does not your religion tell you that it is right? Answer me that?" Uniacke hesitated. A conviction had been growing up in him all the evening that his guest was suffering severely under some nervous affliction; one of those obscure diseases which change the whole colour of life to the sufferer, which distort all actions however simple and ordinary, which render diminutive trials monstrous, and small evils immense and ineffably tragic. It seemed to Uniacke to be his duty to combat Sir Graham's increasing melancholy, which actually bordered upon despair. At the same time, the young clergyman could not hide from his mind--a mind flooded with conscience--that the painter was slightly to blame for the action which had been followed by so strange a result.