come to see his father as he saw other men, not as a superior creature to be looked up to with awe, but as a human animal—like himself—grown old and hard and mechanical—though he had once been young and had known the enthusiasm of love and marriage—cleverly using his brain to support his wife and family, and pathetically nearing the obscurity of his grave. He saw him, if not with strong affection, at least with pity and respect, as a man who had made the best of an undistinguished success in law and who lived without vices. And if he saw no more in him than this, it was because the father—living up to that stern ideal of British parents which the race has brought to Canada—had never tried to make himself beloved by his sons, but only respected and obeyed.
It is doubtful whether Don, as he went downstairs to that night's interview, went with any respect for the man he was to face. Certainly, he did not intend to obey him. Their short colloquy on the way home from church had been to the boy a brief and misleading glimpse into his father's mind; and he had constructed a whole life of politic hypocrisy from the lawyer's confession of faith in the worldly advantages of church membership. He did not suspect that his father had been through a struggle with these same doubts which now assailed himself; that he had arrived at a working compromise with them and made a peace; that he had preserved the integrity of his own mind without resisting the police of organized religion. Still less did Don suspect that the older man, remembering his own youth, felt a reluctant
