My father pressed me into a chair; he heaped good things upon my plate; he could not do enough to prove the warmth of his welcome and the pathos of loneliness that underlay it.
“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.