The color came into the fine, strong face and a pained expression in his eyes.
"I'm sorry, sir! I didn't think of it that way. I thought you felt some kind of an obligation; I never felt so, but you said you did; and I thought if I got out of your way I would trouble you no more."
"Trouble me! Trouble me! Why, son, I like to be troubled once in a while by something besides getting money and spending it. You never gave me a shadow of trouble, except these last weeks when you've disappeared and I couldn't do anything for you. You've somehow crept into my life and I can't get you out. In fact, I don't want to. But, boy, if you felt that way, what made you come to New York at all? You didn't feel that way the night you came to my house to dinner."
Michael's eyes owned that this was true, but his firm lips showed that he would never betray the real reason for the change.
"I--didn't--realize--sir!"
"Realize? Realize what?"
"I didn't realize the difference between my station and yours, sir. There had never been anything during my years in school to make me know. I am a 'child of the slums'"--unconsciously he drifted into quotations from Mrs. Endicott's speech to him--"and you belong to a fine old family. I don't know what terrible things are in my blood. You have riches and a name beyond reproach--" He had seen the words in an article he had read the evening before, and felt that they fitted the man and the occasion. He did not know that he was quoting. They had become a part of his thoughts.
"I might make the riches if I tried hard," he held up his head proudly, "but I could never make the name. I will always be a child of the slums, no matter what I do!"
"Child of the fiddlesticks!" interrupted Endicott. "Wherever did you get all that, rot? It sounds as if you had been attending society functions and listening to their twaddle. It doesn't matter what you are the child of, if you're a mind to be a man. This is a free country, son, and you can be and climb where you please. Tell me, where did you get all these ideas?"
Michael looked down. He did not wish to answer.
"In a number of places," he answered evasively.
"Where!"
"For one thing, I've been down to the alley where I used to live." The eyes were looking into his now, and Endicott felt a strange swelling of pride that he had had a hand in the making of this young man.