When I pressed her, she told me
    that she had enough for your keep and education and her own
    sustenance for the time she must still live; that your father and she
    had agreed that you should be brought up to a healthy and strenuous
    life rather than to one of luxury; and she thought that it would be
    better for the development of your character that you should learn to
    be self-reliant and to be content with what your dear father had left
    you. She had always been a wise and thoughtful girl, and now all her
    wisdom and thought were for you, your father's and her child. When
    she spoke of you and your future, she said many things which I
    thought memorable. One of them I remember to this day. It was
    apropos of my saying that there is a danger of its own kind in
    extreme poverty. A young man might know too much want. She answered
    me: "True! That is so! But there is a danger that overrides it;"
    and after a time went on:

    "It is better not to know wants than not to know want!" I tell you,
    boy, that is a great truth, and I hope you will remember it for
    yourself as well as a part of the wisdom of your mother. And here
    let me say something else which is a sort of corollary of that wise
    utterance:

    I dare say you thought me very hard and unsympathetic that time I
    would not, as one of your trustees, agree to your transferring your
    little fortune to Miss MacKelpie. I dare say you bear a grudge
    towards me about it up to this day. Well, if you have any of that
    remaining, put it aside when you know the truth. That request of
    yours was an unspeakable delight to me. It was like your mother
    coming back from the dead. That little letter of yours made me wish
    for the first time that I had a son--and that he should be like you. I fell into a sort of reverie, thinking if I were yet too old to
    marry, so that a son might be with me in my declining years--if such
    were to ever be for me. But I concluded that this might not be. There was no woman whom I knew or had ever met with that I could love
    as your mother loved your father and as he loved her. So I resigned
    myself to my fate. I must go my lonely road on to the end. And then
    came a ray of light into my darkness: there was you. Though you
    might not feel like a son to me--I could not expect it when the
    memory of that sweet relationship was more worthily filled. But I
    could feel like a father to you. Nothing could prevent that or
    interfere with it, for I would keep it as my secret in the very holy
    of holies of my heart, where had been for thirty years the image of a
    sweet little child--your mother. My boy, when in your future life
    you shall have happiness and honour and power, I hope you will
    sometimes give a thought to the lonely old man whose later years your
    very existence seemed to brighten. The thought of your mother recalled me to my duty. I had undertaken
    for her a sacred task: to carry out her wishes regarding her son. I
    knew how she would have acted. It might--would--have been to her a
    struggle of inclination and duty; and duty would have won. And so I
    carried out my duty, though I tell you it was a harsh and bitter task
    to me at the time. But I may tell you that I have since been glad
    when I think of the result. I tried, as you may perhaps remember, to
    carry out your wishes in another way, but your letter put the
    difficulty of doing so so clearly before me that I had to give it up. And let me tell you that that letter endeared you to me more than
    ever. I need not tell you that thenceforth I followed your life very
    closely. When you ran away to sea, I used in secret every part of
    the mechanism of commerce to find out what had become of you. Then,
    until you had reached your majority, I had a constant watch kept upon
    you--not to interfere with you in any way, but so that I might be
    able to find you should need arise. When in due course I heard of
    your first act on coming of age I was satisfied. I had to know of
    the carrying out of your original intention towards Janet Mac Kelpie,
    for the securities had to be transferred. From that time on I watched--of course through other eyes--your chief
    doings. It would have been a pleasure to me to have been able to
    help in carrying out any hope or ambition of yours, but I realized
    that in the years intervening between your coming of age and the
    present moment you were fulfilling your ideas and ambitions in your
    own way, and, as I shall try to explain to you presently, my
    ambitions also. You were of so adventurous a nature that even my own
    widely-spread machinery of acquiring information--what I may call my
    private "intelligence department"--was inadequate. My machinery was
    fairly adequate for the East--in great part, at all events. But you
    went North and South, and West also, and, in addition, you essayed
    realms where commerce and purely real affairs have no
    foothold--worlds of thought, of spiritual import, of psychic
    phenomena--speaking generally, of mysteries. As now and again I was
    baffled in my inquiries, I had to enlarge my mechanism, and to this
    end started--not in my own name, of course--some new magazines
    devoted to certain branches of inquiry and adventure. Should you
    ever care to know more of these things, Mr. Trent, in whose name the
    stock is left, will be delighted to give you all details. Indeed,
    these stocks, like all else I have, shall be yours when the time
    comes, if you care to ask for them. By means of _The Journal of
    Adventure_, _The Magazine of Mystery_, _Occultism_, _Balloon and
    Aeroplane_, _The Submarine_, _Jungle and Pampas_, _The Ghost World_,
    _The Explorer_, _Forest and Island_, _Ocean and Creek_, I was often
    kept informed when I should otherwise have been ignorant of your
    whereabouts and designs. For instance, when you had disappeared into
    the Forest of the Incas, I got the first whisper of your strange
    adventures and discoveries in the buried cities of Eudori from a
    correspondent of _The Journal of Adventure_ long before the details
    given in _The Times_ of the rock-temple of the primeval savages,
    where only remained the little dragon serpents, whose giant ancestors
    were rudely sculptured on the sacrificial altar. I well remember how
    I thrilled at even that meagre account of your going in alone into
    that veritable hell. It was from _Occultism_ that I learned how you
    had made a stay alone in the haunted catacombs of Elora, in the far
    recesses of the Himalayas, and of the fearful experiences which, when
    you came out shuddering and ghastly, overcame to almost epileptic
    fear those who had banded themselves together to go as far as the
    rock-cut approach to the hidden temple.