But I have no space to dwell upon those delightful years, around which memory still fondly hovers.One by one they went by, and as they passed we two grew dearer and yet more dear to each other.Few sons have been loved as I love Leo, and few fathers know the deep and continuous affection that Leo bears to me.
The child grew into the boy, and the boy into the young man, as one by one the remorseless years flew by, and as he grew and increased, so did his beauty and the beauty of his mind grow with him.When he was about fifteen they used to call him Beauty about the college, and me they nicknamed the Beast.Beauty and the Beast was what they called us when we went out walking together, as we used to do every day.Once Leo attacked a great strapping butcher's man, twice his size, because he sang it out after us, and thrashed him, toothrashed him fairly.I walked on and pretended not to see, till the combat got too exciting, when I turned round and cheered him on to victory.It was the chaff of the college at the time, but I could not help it.Then when he was a little older the undergraduates got fresh names for us.They called me Charon and Leo the Greek god! I will pass over my own appellation with the humble remark that Iwas never handsome, and did not grow more so as I grew older.As for his, there was no doubt about its fitness.Leo at twenty-one might have stood for a statue of the youthful Apollo.I never saw anybody to touch him in looks, or anybody so absolutely unconscious of them.As for his mind, he was brilliant and keen witted, but not a scholar.He had not the dullness necessary for that result.We followed out his father's instructions as regards his education strictly enough, and on the whole the results, especially so far as the Greek and Arabic went, were satisfactory.I learned the latter language in order to help to teach it to him, but after five years of it he knew it as well as I didalmost as well as the professor who instructed us both.I always was a great sportsmanit is my one passionand every autumn we went away somewhere shooting or fishing, sometimes to Scotland, sometimes to Norway, once even to Russia.Iam a good shot, but even in this he learned to excel me.
When Leo was eighteen I moved back into my rooms, and entered him at my own college, and at twenty-one he took his degreea respectable degree, but not a very high one.Then it was that I, for the first time, told him something of his own story, and of the mystery that loomed ahead.Of course he was very curious about it, and of course I explained to him that his curiosity could not be gratified at present.After that, to pass the time away, I suggested that he should get himself called to the bar; and this he did, reading at Cambridge, and only going up to London to eat his dinners.
I had only one trouble about him, and that was that every young woman who came across him, or, if not every one, nearly so, would insist on falling in love with him.Hence arose difficulties which I need not enter into here, though they were troublesome enough at the time.On the whole, he behaved fairly well; Icannot say more than that.
And so the time went by till at last he reached his twenty-fifth birthday, at which date this strange and, in some ways, awful history really begins.
