THE THREE VISITORS
"No," said Mr. Huss. "But before you three gentlemen proceed with your office, I should like to tell you something of what the school and my work in it, and my work for education, is to me. I am a man of little more than fifty. A month ago I counted with a reasonable confidence upon twenty years more of work before I relaxed. . . . Then these misfortunes rained upon me. I have lost all my private independence; there have been these shocking deaths in the school; my son, my only son. . . killed. . . trouble has darkened the love and kindness of my wife. . . and now my body is suffering so that my mind is like a swimmer struggling through waves of pain. . . far from land. . . . These are heavy blows. But the hardest blow of all, harder to bear than any of these others—I do not speak rashly, gentlemen, I have thought it out through an endless night—the last blow will be this rejection of my life work. That will strike the inmost me, the heart and soul of me. . . ."
He paused.
"You mustn't take it quite like that, Mr. Huss," protested Mr. Dad. "It isn't fair to us to put it like that."
"I want you to listen to me," said Mr. Huss.
"Only the very kindest motives," continued Mr. Dad.
"Let me speak," said Mr. Huss, with the voice of authority that had ruled Woldingstanton for five and twenty years. "I cannot wrangle and contradict. At most we have an hour."
Mr. Dad made much the same sound that a dog will make when it has proposed to bark and has been
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