“Nay, Isocrates,” said the old man, “is it not written that if by our fortitude we sustain the Dynasty to its appointed hour, Nature will grant it a means to affirm itself?” Speaking out of a simple faith the old man turned for the first time to the boy, who, throughout this interview, had stood timidly at his father’s side. The old faded eyes seemed to devour the delicate and shrinking face of the child with their surmise. Suddenly he took the boy by the hand. “It is by this that the Dynasty will affirm itself,” said the old man, enfolding the frail form in a kind of prophetic exaltation. The boy’s father seemed to cower at these words of his old preceptor. “My prophetic soul!” he cried. Horror appeared to scarify the wasted features of the boy’s father. The proud gladness of the well-remembered voice had seemed to break the boy’s father; for those ears it was charged with mockery. The old school-master, still smiling in the expression of his simple faith, received his former pupil in his arms and took him to his bosom with the ineffable tenderness by which a matron consoles a young girl. The boy could not understand this painful scene which had been enacted before him. He could form no conception of the manner in which two natures had been wrung by their first meeting after thirty years. He could only discern, and that very dimly, that this aged man bore a similar relation to his father that his father bore to himself. The voice, the look, the bearing of this old man, were precisely those with which he himself was succoured when he awoke shuddering and bathed in terror, and implored his father to strike a match to dispel the phantasies which peopled the darkness of the night. III Sunk in bewilderment that one so wise and powerful as his father should be so distressed, the boy seemed to lose the sense of what was taking place around him. But he was recalled to it with a start of dismay; his father was about to leave the room. Involuntarily he turned to the door also, and placed his hand on his father’s arm. “Do you forget that you are now at school, Achilles?” said his father in a low voice. The boy could not repress a little quiver of fear. “You--you are not going to forsake me, my father!” he said. “What of the resolve you took last night?” said his father. “By whose act is it, beloved one, that you have come to school?” A vague sense of darkness seemed to close about the boy. “But our little room,” he said, shivering. “Am I never to return to it, my father? Am I never to behold it again?” “I make you my promise, beloved one,” said his father softly. “At dusk I will return to take you there.” Furtively, mournfully the boy relaxed his grip of his father’s hand.