Often as they sat together the little boy would absently slip his hand into the big, warm, bony hand of the old man, turning and twisting it there until he felt an answering pressure.

This embarrassed the old man.

Though he would really have liked to take the little boy up to his breast and hold him there, he knew not how; and he would even be careful not to restrain the little hand in his own--to hold it, yet to leave it free to withdraw at its first uneasy wriggle.
Of this shackled spirit of kindness, always striving within the old man, the little boy had come to be entirely conscious.

So real was it to him, so dependable, that he never suspected that a certain little blow with the open hand one day was meant to punish him for conduct he had persisted in after three emphatic admonitions.
"Oh! that _hurts_!" he had cried, looking up at the confused old man with unimpaired faith in his having meant not more than a piece of friendly roughness.

This look of flawless confidence in the uprightness of his purpose, the fine determination to save him chagrin by smiling even though the hurt place tingled, left in the old man's mind a biting conviction that he had been actually on the point of behaving as one gentleman may not behave to another.