Indeed, during the first weeks after
Falk's return he preserved a stern and dignified silence. After all, the
boy must learn that authority was authority, and he prided himself that he
knew, better than any number of Oxford Dons, how to train and educate the
young. Nevertheless light broke through. Some of Falk's jokes were so good
that his father, who had a real sense of fun if only a slight sense of
humour, was bound to laugh. Very soon father and son resumed their old
relations of sudden tempers and mutual admiration, and a strange, rather
pathetic, quite uneloquent love that was none the less real because it
was, on either side, completely selfish.
But there was a fourth reason why Falk's return caused so slight a storm.
That reason was that the Archdeacon was now girding up his loins before he
entered upon one of his famous campaigns. There had been many campaigns in
the past. Campaigns were indeed as truly the breath of the Archdeacon's
nostrils as they had been once of the great Napoleon's--and in every one
of them had the Archdeacon been victorious.
This one was to be the greatest of them all, and was to set the sign and
seal upon the whole of his career.
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