“That is a reason why I should not see them.”
“Well, to tell you the truth, Father, this morning's paper has something about somebody else, and that was why I brought it.”
“Eh?”
“Somebody near to you—very near and—— But I'll leave it with you——Nothing to complain of this morning—no?”
But John Storm was already deep in the columns of the newspaper. He found the news intended for him. It was the death of his father. The paragraph was cruel and merciless. “Thus the unhappy man who was brought up at Bow Street two days ago is now a peer in his own right and the immediate heir to an earldom.”
The moment was a bitter and terrible one. Memories of past years swept over him—half-forgotten incidents of his boyhood when his father was his only friend and he walked with his hand in his—memories of his father's love for him, his hopes, his aims, his ambitions, and all the vast ado of his poor delusive dreams. And then came thoughts of the broken old man dying alone, and of himself in his prison cell. It had been a strangely familiar thought to him of late that if he left London at seven in the morning he could speak to his father at seven the same night. And now his father was gone, the last opportunity was lost, and he could speak to him no more.
But he tried to conquer the call of blood which he had put aside so long, and to set over against it the claims of his exalted mission and the spirit of the teaching of Christ. What had Christ said? “Call no man your father upon the earth; for one is your Father which is in heaven!”
“Yes,” he thought, “that's it—'for one is your Father which is in heaven.'”
Then he took up the newspaper again, thinking to read with a calmer mind the report of his father's death and burial, but his eye fell on a different matter.
“ANOTHER MYSTERIOUS DISAPPEARANCE.—Hardly has the public mind recovered from the perplexity attending the disappearance of a well-known clergyman from Westminster, when the news comes of a no less mysterious disappearance of a popular actress from a West-End theatre.”