Page:The Father Confessor, Stories of Danger and Death.djvu/103

Rh "The boy," she wrote, "wants the calm open-air life you can so easily give him; his heart is the heart of a poet, and cannot bear to be tied up with the conventuality of town life. His father is too harsh with him, forgetting he was himself once young. Be kind to my poor boy; he is not very strong."

When the young man arrived, Henry found him a worthless boor—idle and a drunkard. The lout fastened upon him like a parasite, and the little farm had to support two. Henry relinquished his immediate dreams of returning home or sending for Mollie, and took upon himself the task of earning for this young nephew, as he had done for his brothers and sisters.

At first he thought it possible to make a man of him, for the boy was full of insincere sentimental effects, hard to see through; now lamenting his mother's absence with tears, and writing her long letters of affection, which he read to his uncle with evident pride in their composition; now promising his uncle he would never touch drink again, so fervently that it was impossible to believe that he meant nothing.

For a year Henry wavered between the impulse to cast this worthless boor from him and