Page:Frank Packard - Greater Love Hath No Man.djvu/22

 you will! We've brought you up all these years and treated you like—like one of us, and all you've had and all you've got you owe to us. You'll—you'll repay it now, Varge, won't you?"

The blackness of the room was gone, transformed into quick, shifting scenes and pictures that staged themselves in the little chamber before Varge's mind—colourful, vivid, real—pictures of childhood, memory-dimmed; pictures of boyhood, standing out more sharply, in clearer focus; pictures of later years; pictures of yesterday. The years passed in lightning sequence before him. A foundling, nameless, a child of five, adopted from an orphan asylum, here he had been given a home; here he and this man beside him had been brought up together in the little country town, until the other had gone out to college and he, his own common school education finished, had begun to work for Doctor Merton, his benefactor; here he had grown to manhood, he was twenty-five now; here he had spent his life, knowing almost a father's consideration, almost a mother's care, which in turn had kindled a love and gratitude in his own heart that had grown almost to worship with the years, a gratitude and loyalty that had caused him to crush back longings for a wider sphere—contenting himself meanwhile by constant study, acquiring in a hard school the knowledge of medicine that one day, when these two should be gone, he meant to make his profession—for Harold Merton, ten years his senior, was little at home now, and they, growing old, had come to lean intimately upon him, to depend on him, to need him. And so he had lived on there—as Varge, the doctor's man.