To Tom Whitelaw this was the conclusion of the whole matter. A son must have a mother as well as a father. If there was no mother there was no son. The inference brought him a relief in which there were two strains of regret.
He would be farther away from Hildred. They would have more trials to meet, more bridges to cross. Very well! He was not accustomed to having things made easy. For whatever he possessed, which was not much, he had longed and worked and worked and longed till he got it. But he got it in the end. In the end he would get Hildred. Better win her so than to have her drop as a present in his arms. If not wholly content, he was sure.
In the matter of his second regret he was only sorry. It began to grow clear to him that a father needs a son more than a son needs a father. Of this kind of need he himself knew nothing. He was what he was, detached, independent, assured. He never asked for sympathy, and if he craved for love, he had learned to stifle the craving, or direct it into the one narrow channel which flowed toward Hildred. The paternal and filial instinct, having had no function in his life, seemed to have shriveled up.
But the instinct of response to the slightest movement of goodwill, to the faintest plea for help, was
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 active with daily use. It leaped forth eagerly; if it couldn't leap forth something within him fretted and cried like a hound when the scent leads to earth. As Paul the Apostle, he could be all things to all men, if by any means he might help some. If Henry Whitelaw needed a son, he could be a son to him. The tie of blood was in no small measure a matter of indifference. His impulse was like Honey's "next o' kin." He remembered, as he had learned in school, that kin and kind were words with a common origin. Whitelaw's truest kinship with himself was in his kindness. His kinship with Whitelaw could as truly be in his devotion. Devotion was what he could offer most spontaneously.
If only that could satisfy the father yearning for his son! It could do it up to a point, since the banker identified kindness and kinship much as he did himself. But beyond that point there was the cry of the middle-aged man for some one who was part of himself on whom he could lean now that his strength was beginning to decline. That his two acknowledged children were nothing but a care sent him groping all the more eagerly for the son who might be a support to him. The son who was not a son might be better than no one, as he himself confessed; and yet nothing on earth could satisfy his empty soul but his own son. Not to be that son made Tom sorry; but without a mother, how could he be?
Otherwise, to remain as what life had made him was unalloyed relief. He was himself. In his own phrase, he was more himself than most men. But to enter the Whitelaw family, and belong to it, would
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 turn him into some one else. He might have a right there; an accident such as happens every day might easily make him the head of it; and yet he would have to put forth affections and develop points of view which could only come from a man with another kind of past. To be the son of that mother, and the brother of that sister, sorry for them as he was, would mean the kind of metamorphosis, the change in the whole nature, of which he had read in ancient mythology. He would make the attempt if he was called to it; but he shrank from the call.
Nevertheless, he took up his job as assistant to the great man's confidential secretary. This was a Mr. Phips whom Tom didn't like, but with whom he got on easily. He easily got on with him because Mr. Phips himself made a point of it.
A rubicund, smiling man, he had to be seen twice before you gave him credit for his unctuous ability. There was in him that mingling of honesty and craft which go to make the henchman, and sometimes the ecclesiastic. While he couldn't originate anything, he could be an instrument accurate and sharp. Always ready to act boldly, it was with a boldness of which some one else must assume the responsibility. He could be the power behind the throne, but never the power sitting on it publicly. With an almost telepathic gift for reading Whitelaw's mind, he could carry out its wishes before they were expressed. From sheer induction he could, in a secondary way, direct affairs from which he never took a penny of the profits over and above his salary.
Again like the ecclesiastic and the henchman, he
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 had neither will nor conscience beyond the cause he served. A born factotum, with no office but to carry out, he accepted Tom without questioning. Without questioning he set him to those duties which, as a beginner, would be within his grasp. He didn't need to be told that when a message or a document was to be sent to the most private of all offices, it should be through the person of this particular young man. Without having invented for Tom the soubriquet of the Whitelaw Baby, he didn't frown at it on hearing it pass round the office, as it did withi............