The conversation between solicitor and client was resumed.

“Is it possible,” quoth Mr. Thompson, the moment he had ushered his client into his private room, “that you will consent, Sir Austin, to see him and receive him again?”

“Certainly,” the baronet replied. “Why not? This by no means astonishes me. When there is no longer danger to my son he will be welcome as he was before. He is a schoolboy. I knew it. I expected it. The results of your principle, Thompson!”

“One of the very worst books of that abominable class!” exclaimed the old lawyer, opening at the coloured frontispiece, from which brazen Miss Random smiled bewitchingly out, as if she had no doubt of captivating Time and all his veterans on a fair field. “Pah!” he shut her to with the energy he would have given to the office of publicly slapping her face; “from this day I diet him on bread and water — rescind his pocket-money! — How he could have got hold of such a book! How he —! And what ideas! Concealing them from me as he has done so cunningly! He trifles with vice! His mind is in a putrid state! I might have believed — I did believe — I might have gone on believing — my son Ripton to be a moral young man!” The old lawyer interjected on the delusion of fathers, and sat down in a lamentable abstraction.

“The lad has come out!” said Sir Austin. “His adoption of the legal form is amusing. He trifles with vice, true: people newly initiated are as hardy as its intimates, and a young sinner’s amusements will resemble those of a confirmed debauchee. The satiated, and the insatiate, appetite alike appeal to extremes. You are astonished at this revelation of your son’s condition. I expected it; though assuredly, believe me, not this sudden and indisputable proof of it. But I knew that the seed was in him, and therefore I have not latterly invited him to Raynham. School, and the corruption there, will bear its fruits sooner or later. I could advise you, Thompson, what to do with him: it would be my plan.”

Mr. Thompson murmured, like a true courtier, that he should esteem it an honour to be favoured with Sir Austin Feverel’s advice: secretly resolute, like a true Briton, to follow his own.

“Let him, then,” continued the baronet, “see vice in its nakedness. While he has yet some innocence, nauseate him! Vice, taken little by little, usurps gradually the whole creature. My counsel to you, Thompson, would be, to drag him through the sinks of town.”

Mr. Thompson began to blink again.

“Oh, I shall punish him, Sir Austin! Do not fear me, sir. I have no tenderness for vice.”

“That is not what is wanted, Thompson. You mistake me. He should be dealt with gently. Heavens! do you hope to make him hate vice by making him a martyr for its sake? You must descend from the pedestal of age to become his Mentor: cause him to see how certainly and pitilessly vice itself punishes: accompany him into its haunts”——

“Over town?” broke forth Mr. Thompson.

“Over town,” said the baronet.

“And depend upon it,” he added, “that, until fathers act thoroughly up to their duty, we shall see the sights we see in great cities, and hear the tales we hear in little villages, with death and calamity in our homes, and a legacy of sorrow and shame to the generations to come. I do aver,” he exclaimed, becoming excited, “that, if it were not for the duty to my son, and the hope I cherish in him, I, seeing the accumulation of misery we are handing down to an innocent posterity — to whom, through our sin, the fresh breath of life will be foul — I— yes! I would hide my name! For whither are we tending? What home is pure absolutely? What cannot our doctors and lawyers tell us?”

Mr. Thompson acquiesced significantly.

“And what is to come of this?” Sir Austin continued. “When the sins of the fathers are multiplied by the sons, is not perdition the final sum of things? And is not life, the boon of heaven, growing to be the devil’s game utterly? But for my son, I would hide my name. I would not bequeath it to be cursed by them that walk above my grave!”

This was indeed a terrible view of existence. Mr. Thompson felt uneasy. There was a dignity in his client, an impressiveness in his speech, that silenced remonstrating reason and the cry of long years of comfortable respectability. Mr. Thompson went to church regularly; paid his rates and dues without overmuch, or at least more than common, grumbling. On the surface he was a good citizen, fond of his children, faithful to his wife, devoutly marching to a fair seat in heaven on a path paved by something better than a thousand a year. But here was a man sighting him from below the surface, and though it was an unfair, unaccustomed, not to say unEnglish, method of regarding one’s fellow-man, Mr. Thompson was troubled by it. What though his client exaggerated? Facts were at the bottom of what he said. And he was acute — he had unmasked Ripton! Since Ripton’s exposure he winced at a personal application in the text his client preached from. Possibly this was the secret source of part of his anger against that peccant youth.

Mr. Thompson shook his head, and, with dolefully puckered visage and a pitiable contraction of his shoulders, rose slowly up from his chair. Apparently he was about to speak, but he straightway turned and went meditatively to a si............