“After all these years,” muttered Mr. Leigh, “I—I couldn't help it, Thomas—Tommy boy.” His eyes were moist with tears and very bright with a feverish excitement. “Well, let us finish. While I had taken pains never to let you know I was a rich man—I am not really very rich—I had never spoken to you about a profession. You did not show a special liking for any, and after your graduation the decision as to what you should do with your life confronted me. I wasn't interested in your business success, but it seemed to me that you ought to do more than merely take care of what I should leave you. I knew that, barring accidents, I should live until you were old enough to become the sort of man you would be after I died.
“I didn't want you an idler, not even a nice, decent idler with gentlemanly manners and harmless hobbies. And there was also the danger that a rich man's son might become what so many nice boys have become, not entirely through any fault of their own or even of their parents, but from not having something useful to do. I wanted to see you become a man. I wanted you to have all the advantages of a boy who has his own way to make, and I didn't know how. I could not make any argument of mine convincing enough to myself to induce you to act as though you were penniless. I didn't wish to make poverty your spur, but I wanted you to be a poor boy, without my having to refuse you money when I had so much that I craved to give you if only I could give it safely! So I studied my problem as I do any business problem. I must do what should bring out what was best and manliest in you; something to prove whether you were pure gold or merely yellow.
“So—I—I tested you, my son—an awful test almost beyond my strength. You will forgive me if I have embittered some months of your life. But I suffered more than you—much more, Tommy! Suffered from your absence, for I saw that you were a man the moment I saw how you took my—my confession that dreadful morning. But you were a rich man's son and I had to save you from your own father! The love that had made me a thief might easily make me a fool!” Tommy shook his head, but his father continued: “Every time you sent me those remittances from Dayton—Tommy, Tommy, they nearly killed me! But I allowed you to think that you were the son of a thief and that you had to make good my crime, knowing that if you behaved like a man then, you would be a man after you discovered that you did not have to pay back that money. And you are a man, aren't you, Tommy?”
Tommy was conscious of a feeling of relief so great, of a new love so strong, of a gratitude so deep and a happiness so all-pervading, that there was no room for regret over what he had gone through when the secret held a flaming sword over his bare head. Then came poignant remorse that he had never even dimly realized how great was this love of which his father had spoken. A man's soul had been bared utterly before Tommy's gaze—a thing no man can do except under the compulsion of a love unutterably great. Something was due to that man and the naked soul of him.
“Father,” said Tommy, bravely confessing his own misdeed, “I want to tell you one thing. It may hurt you, but I want you to know it. I never loved you before. I don't think I was really your son until to-day.”
“Oh yes, you were,” said Mr. Leigh, hastily. “Yes, you were—my son and your mother's! And now I can talk to you about her as much as I wish. I had not dared before. But tell me—what about Dayton? Are you going back?”
Tommy for the first time realized that he was a rich man's son. There was no need to pay back the seventeen thousand dollars. There was no need to work for wages. But—well, his father would decide and he would do whatever his father wished. He owed it to his father.
“I don't know. What do you want me to do, dad?”
Mr. Leigh could not help seeing Tommy's loving loyalty.
“What do you wish to do, my son?” he asked, eagerly.