He had loved his father--there had been between them an unbreakable bond; yet this very love had made him suffer at every thought of him while he was living, whereas now he could love him with all tender memories and with no poisonous misgivings about future meetings with their humiliations.

Now his father was made perfect in Heaven, and even Grandfather Delcher--whose aloofness here he had ceased to blame--would not refuse to meet and know him there.
Naturally, then, he turned to his grandfather in his great need for a new idol to fill the vacant niche.

Aforetime the old man in his study upstairs had been little more than a gray shadow, a spirit of gloom, stubbornly imprisoning another spirit that would have been kind if it could have escaped.

But the little boy drew near to him, and found him curiously companionable.

Where once he had shunned him, he now went freely to the study with his lessons or his storybook, or for talk of any little matter.
His grandfather, it seemed, could understand many things which so old a man could scarcely have been expected to understand.