But again his thoughts returned to the child, and he was surprised with a vibration of tenderness sweet as honey in his veins.

A strange yearning came over him like a physical weakness for the touch of his son's body.
His eye caught his shadow on the wall, grotesque and forbidding; the large head, bunched beneath the square shoulders, thrust outwards in a hideous lump.

Monster and outcast was he?
Well, he would show them that only an accident separated the hunchback from his fellows.

He thought with a fierce joy of his son's straight back and shapely limbs.
This was his child, that he could claim and exhibit to the world.

Then his delight changed to a vague terror--the fear of an animal that dreads a trap, and finds itself caught.