"What made his faith die?" asked Jerry, curiously.
"Because he grew to distrust his fellowmen. That second visit to Peter Westley----" Mrs. Travis spoke quickly to hide her bitterness. "He was so sure that what he had made was good--an inventor has always, my dear, an irrational love for the thing he has created--and to have it _spurned_! He was supersensitive, super--everything. Then my own health went to pieces. I suppose I simply was not getting enough to eat to give me the strength to meet the mental strain under which I had to live--and you were coming. From his last visit to Peter Westley he returned with a little money, but he was as a crushed, broken man--his bitterness had unbalanced his mind. He said that it was for my health that he came away with me, but I knew that it was to get away from the world that he hated--and to hide his failure! Your Little-Dad took us in. He knew at once that your father was a very sick man and he brought him to his cabin here on Kettle. But even here your father suffered, and after you were born he feared for you. He was obsessed with the thought that _you_ had all life to face----"
"How dreadfully sorry you must have felt for him," whispered Jerry, shyly, trying to make it all seem true.
"I felt sorry for him, child, not that he had been so disappointed but because he had not the strength to rally from it. I don't believe God made him that way; I think he sacrificed too much of himself to his genius. This world we live in demands so much of us--such _different_ things, that, if we are to meet everything squarely, we cannot develop one side of our minds and let the other side go. I am telling you all this, Jerry, that you may understand how I have felt--about you. The months after your father died were sort of a blank to me--I lived on here because I had nowhere else to go. Gradually my gratitude to John Travis turned to real affection--not like what I had given your father, but something quite as deep. And the years I have lived with him here have been very happy--as though my poor little ship had found the still waters of an inland stream after having been tossed on a stormy sea. And I've tried to make myself think that in these still waters I could keep _you_ always, that you would grow up here and--perhaps--marry someone----" she laughed. "Mothers always dream way ahead, darling. But as you grew older I could see that that was not going to be easy. You've so quickly outgrown everything I can give you--or that anyone--here--can; you have grown so curious, your mind is always reaching out. What is here, what is there, what is this, where is that--questions like these always on your tongue! And you _are_ like your father--very."