“I’m afraid you will, if you squeeze me so tightly as that.”
The boy laughed softly as he relaxed his hold.
“That would be a funny way of showing you how much I loved you, wouldn’t it, dad? Squeezing you to death!”
“Yes, I suppose it would,” replied Owen, huskily, as he tucked the bedclothes round the child’s shoulders. “But don’t talk any more, dear, just hold my hand and try to sleep.”
Lying there very quietly, holding his father’s hand and occasionally kissing it, the child presently fell asleep....
Owen lay listening to the howling of the wind and the noise of the rain as it poured heavily on the roof. But it was not the storm only that kept him awake. Through the dark hours of the night his thoughts were still haunted by the words on that piece of blood-stained paper on a kitchen wall: “This is not my crime, but Society’s.”
Behold the Future
(From “The Red Wave”)
By Joseph-Henry Rosny, the Elder