The boy waited, battling for the ground under his feet. At length he lifted his head, and his eyes met the older man’s with a collected seriousness. “What is the thing I can do for you, bishop?”
Over the face of the old clergyman, as he watched, came a deep sadness. “Perhaps—I’m afraid—it’s asking too much of you,” he said. “I want you, in your father’s name, to forgive me.”
A flame leaped into the boy’s look. “Bishop—oh, bishop!” He bent and caught the old hands as if they were a woman’s hands. “As if there could be any debt between us that wasn’t all on my side,” he cried. “She—my own mother, who is me—she made you unhappy and drove you to the one wrong thing you ever did. But we won’t talk about it!” He was very close to the black-clothed, quiet figure, and his big fingers fell on the bishop’s shoulder. “Talking’s no use—it’s time that tells. Wait till I can put in years to prove that I mean what I say. You’ll let me be—the rest of your life—a little bit what a son might have been?”
He stooped anxiously to the face below, and with that he saw that the eyes of the bishop were filled with tears. And through them he was smiling.
“It’s just the sort of boy I like,” brought out the bishop emphatically. “My son—the rest of my life. But—” He stopped a moment and then spoke in a delighted tone. “That’s wonderful,” he said. “That’s the greatest thing anybody in the world could do for me. And you’re the only one who could do it. But it isn’t for long, my dear—” He hesitated a mere second. “Doctor Fletcher told me to-day that I’ve only two months more to live.”
At the quiet, cheerful words the lad started erect, horror-struck, and through the boughs of the great oak a slanting sun-ray fell suddenly on his young face and played there, and the bishop tossed up his hand sharply.
“The face!” he cried out. “It was your face! Your angel of life!” and then, as the lad dropped on his knees and bent his head wordless on the table before him, the bishop laid his hand on the fair hair as if in a benediction, and suddenly once again the queer sidewise smile, amused, whimsical, lighted his face.
“My angel of death,” said the bishop.
AMICI