"Yes. How did you know? It was right beside the ocean——" He paused. The look in John McIntyre's face alarmed him. "Ye—ye ain't goin' to get sick again, are ye?"
He arose and came nearer, and the man drew back, with a gesture of loathing. "Your—father—was Joseph Symonds!" he repeated, dazed.
Tim had a fashion, when he was very much interested in anything his friend was saying, of seizing a button of the man's coat and twisting it. He took hold of it now, and turned it around and around, gazing at him wonderingly.
"Yes; did ye know him?" he asked, innocently eager.
John McIntyre's clenched hands relaxed. His first impulse had been to hurl far from him the offspring of the scoundrel who had been his ruin. But one look into the boy's inquiring eyes, gazing at him in perfect faith, rendered him powerless. He let his hand fall heavily upon Tim's shoulder, and holding him back, stared into his wondering face. Line by line he traced resemblances, hitherto unnoticed, to the man he had hated. There was the same pointed chin, the same cunning droop of the eyes. And yet, oh, miracle of love! those very hated features now formed the one thing in the world to which his heart clung. He was overcome by a feeling of utter impotence. Hitherto, his strength had lain in his relentless hatred; and now, what had become of it? It was gone—transformed into another feeling infinitely more potent. Something of the all-conquering force of love—the impossibility of escape from it—was borne in upon John McIntyre's soul. For an instant the veil of mystery that shrouded human suffering seemed to grow transparent, and behind it shone Divine Love in the agony of Calvary. Inevitable, all-pervading, like the voice of the Apocalypse thundering from heaven, it spoke: "I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending."
The man placed his hand on the boy's head in a helpless fashion.
"Are ye sick?" whispered Tim.
"It's nothing," he faltered weakly. "I—I was just feeling weak. Come, it's time you were in bed. It is too stormy for you to go home."
And that night John McIntyre slept with a protecting arm placed around the son of the man who had ruined his life.