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This story was written from the Photoplay ot GORDON V. MAY
Major Thorndyke was dead. His proud old heart was stilled forever, and more secret than the tomb to which his body was presently to be committed. Locked within its depths were his grim despair and his healing joy.
Since first he had held a wee, red, unprepossessing bundle in his arms and been assured that said squalling bundle was His son, the stern-visaged, military man had been fired with one great ambition — one great hope. He lived for the years when he might point to a strong, clean, dominant male thing, taut-fibred, physically and morally, and proclaim to the world: "This is my son!"
As the squalling bundle evolved from the more-or-less tadpolish state into a definite human, the father's desire grew, and it had augmented with the years. A mighty desire blinds us, by its potency, to the truth of things. We do not want to see; therefore, we dont see ; and so it was
with the Major. Then, one day, he awoke. He was compelled to the awakening. And he saw his son. Under the searchlight of realism, the youth showed up — dissolute, purposeless, most pitiably weak — so weak that no outer force had power to tonic his lamentable laxity.
The Major thought that his heart must surely break; he was an old man, and the cosmos did not offer any further fruits to his hand. One's heart does not break with the shattering of the heart's desire. Life is not thus merciful. It goes on, a bruised, maimed thing — but it goes. The Major's heart went, until, just when he thought it must surely stop of its pain if it could not break, Marjorie came back. She had been away, "finishing," that is, learning how to enter a room without colliding conspicuously with any of the furniture, acquiring a smattering of all the least useful languages, and practicing hand-shakes and airy persiflage that