And Francis, who hung upon his father's voice, even when the words were beyond him, answered, "Yes, father, please!" and went on feeding birch strips to the fire, where they turned from vellum to mysterious missals blazoned by an unseen hand.
The idyl continued unbroken for twelve years. Yet it was not wholly idyllic, for, even with money multiplying for them out in the world, there were hard personal conditions against which they had to fight. Ernest Hume delighted in the fierceness of the winter wind, the cold resistance of the snow; cut off, as he honestly felt himself to be, from spiritual growth, he had great joy in strengthening his physical being until it waxed into insolent might. Francis, too, took so happily to the stern yet lovely phases of their life that his father never thought of possible wrong to him in so shaping his early years. As for Ernest Hume, he had bound himself the more irrevocably to right living by renouncing artificial bonds. He had removed his son from the world, and he had thereby taken upon himself the necessity of becoming a better world. Therefore he did not allow himself in any sense to rust out. He did a colossal amount of mental burnishing; and, a gentleman by nature, he adopted a daily purity of speech and courtesy of manner which were less like civilized life than the efflorescence of chivalry at its best. He had chosen for himself a part; by his will, a Round Table sprang up in the woods, though two knights only were to hold counsel there.
The conclusion of the story--so far as a story is ever concluded--must be found in the words of Francis Hume. Before he was twenty, his strength began stirring within him, and he awoke, not to any definite discontent, but to that fever of unrest which has no name. Possibly a lad of different temperament might not have kept housed so long; but he was apparently dreamy, reflective, in love with simple pleasures, and, though a splendid young animal, inspired and subdued by a thrilling quality of soul. And he woke up. How he awoke may be learned only from his letters.
These papers have, by one of the incredible chances of life, come into my hands. I see no possible wrong in their publication, for now the Humes are dead, father and son; nay, even the name adopted here was not their own. They were two slight bubbles of being, destined to rise, to float for a time, and to be again resolved into the unknown sea. Yet while they lived, they were iridescent; the colors of a far-away sun played upon them, and they sent him back his gleams. To lose them wholly out of life were some pain to those of us who have been privileged to love them through their own written confessions. So here are they given back to the world which in no other way could adequately know them.
