“Here’s to my strong son!” he cried, pledging me gayly in a glass of weak wine and water; “my son that I’m feasting for all the doctor--for all the doctor, I say!” “The doctor, dad?” “He wouldn’t have had it, Renalt. He said it was throwing pearls before swine and most wicked waste. I wouldn’t listen to him this time--not I.” “Why, what has he got to do with it?” “Hush!” he paused in his sipping and looked all about him, with a fearful air of listening. “He’s a secret man,” he whispered, “and the mill’s as full of ears as a king’s palace.” I made no answer, but went on with my meal, though I had much ado to swallow it; but to please my father I made a great show of enjoying what was put before me. One thing I noticed with satisfaction, and that was that my father drank sparingly and that only of wine watered to insipidity. Indeed, I was to find that a complete change in him in this respect was not the least marvelous sign of the strange alteration in his temperament. The meal over, we drew our chairs to the fire, and talked the afternoon away on desultory subjects. By and by some shadowy spirit of his old intellectual self seemed to flash and flicker fitfully through his conversation. The afternoon deepened into dusk; strange phantoms, wrought of the leaping flame, came out of corners or danced from wall to ceiling and were gone. He was in the midst of a fine flow of words descriptive of some metaphysical passages he had lately encountered in a book, when his voice trailed off and died away. He crept to me and whispered in my ear: “He’s there, behind the door!” I jumped to my feet, rushed across the room and--met Dr. Crackenthorpe on the threshold. “Can’t you come in like a decent visitor?” I cried, stamping my foot on the floor. He looked pale and, I thought, embarrassed, and he backed a little before my onset. “Why, what’s all this?” he said. “I walked straight up the stairs, as a body should.” “You made no noise,” I said, black and wrathful. “What right have you to prowl into a private house in that fashion?” For a moment his face fell menacing. But it cleared--if such may express the lightening of those muddy features--almost immediately. “Here’s a fine reception!” he cried, “for one who comes to greet the returned prodigal in all good comradeship; and to an old friend, too!” “You were never ours,” I muttered. He plucked a bottle of gin from under his arm, where he had been carrying it. “Your father has given up the pernicious habit,” he said, with a grin, “but I thought, perhaps, he’d break his rule for once on such a stupendous occasion as this. Let us pledge you in a full bumper, Mr. Renalt.” “Pledge whom you like,” I answered, surlily, “but don’t ask a return from me. I don’t drink spirit.” “Then you miss a very exquisite and esthetic pleasure, I may say. Try it this only time. Glasses, Mr. Trender.”