her?  John is a straight-forward, steady-going boy—­how could he get into trouble?  The astonishment of most parents at the sudden accidental revelation of evil in connection with any of their children is almost invariably pathetic.  “My John!  My Mary!  Impossible!” But it is possible.  Very possible.  Decidedly likely.  Some, through lack of experience or understanding, or both, grow hard and bitter on the instant.  They feel themselves astonishingly abased in the face of notable tenderness and sacrifice.  Others collapse before the grave manifestation of the insecurity and uncertainty of life—­the mystic chemistry of our being.  Still others, taught roughly by life, or endowed with understanding or intuition, or both, see in this the latest manifestation of that incomprehensible chemistry which we call life and personality, and, knowing that it is quite vain to hope to gainsay it, save by greater subtlety, put the best face they can upon the matter and call a truce until they can think.  We all know that life is unsolvable—­we who think.  The remainder imagine a vain thing, and are full of sound and fury signifying nothing.

So Edward Butler, being a man of much wit and hard, grim experience, stood there on his doorstep holding in his big, rough hand his thin slip of cheap paper which contained such a terrific indictment of his daughter.  There came to him now a picture of her as she was when she was a very little girl—­she was his first baby girl—­and how keenly he had felt about her all these years.  She had been a beautiful child—­her red-gold hair had been pillowed on his breast many a time, and his hard, rough fingers had stroked her soft cheeks, lo, these thousands of times.  Aileen, his lovely, dashing daughter of twenty-three!  He was lost in dark, strange, unhappy speculations, without any present ability to think or say or do the right thing.  He did not know what the right thing was, he finally confessed to himself.  Aileen!  Aileen!  His Aileen!  If her mother knew this it would break her heart.  She mustn’t!  She mustn’t!  And yet mustn’t she?

The heart of a father!  The world wanders into many strange by-paths of affection.  The love of a mother for her children is dominant, leonine, selfish, and unselfish.  It is concentric.  The love of a husband for his wife, or of a lover for his sweetheart, is a sweet bond of agreement and exchange trade in a lovely contest.  The love of a father for his son or daughter, where it is love at all, is a broad, generous, sad, contemplative giving without thought of return, a hail and farewell to a troubled traveler whom he would do much to guard, a balanced judgment of weakness and strength, with pity for failure and pride in achievement.  It is a lovely, generous, philosophic blossom which rarely asks too much, and seeks only to give wisely and plentifully.  “That my boy may succeed!  That my daughter may be happy!” Who has not heard and dwelt upon these twin fervors of fatherly wisdom and tenderness?