He stopped, and looked up at him with a simple affection which made the young man's heart beat as a woman's glance might have done.
"I think you know I love you," he said. "I have begun to depend on you and count you among my luxuries. I am an old man, and my luxuries are worth a great deal to me. No kindly, thoughtful act of yours has been unregarded, and I have liked your fancy for me almost as a girl likes the attentions of her first lover. Sometimes it has pleased me to be half sentimental over them, and half sentimental over you."
Tredennis flushed with pleasure and warm feeling. He rose impulsively and crossed the hearth.
"I never say things well," he said, "but I should like to try to put into words something of what I feel. You once said you wished I was your son, and I have been glad to remember it. I have no ties. Let your wish be a sort of tie between us. It is a tie I should be proud of, and glad to honor and make an object in my life. Give me what affection you can. I wish for it and need it. If I had been your son you would have counted on me; give me the pleasure and comfort of knowing you count on me now. It has somehow seemed my lot to have no place in the lives of others. Give me this, if I am worth it. I shall be better for it, and happier."
The professor gave him a quiet, half-wistful glance.
"I gave it to you long ago," he said, at length. "The wish has been a tie between us from the first."
And he said it even with a touch of solemnity.
"If it had not been," he added, afterward, "I should not have come to you with my trouble to-night,—feeling so sure that you would understand it."
He made a gesture with his hand.
"Go and walk up and down the room there, as I am used to seeing you," he said. "And I will tell you about it."