"Sounds ridiculous, doesn't it? Still I don't see what else it can be about. What else can there be of a public nature affecting me? 'Affecting yourself' doesn't sound as if they only wanted my advice. Besides, why should they want my advice?"
"Let's see the thing." Harry took it, read it, and flung it down peevishly. "Why the deuce can't he say what he means?"
"Well, a wire's not always absolute secrecy in small towns, is it? And I daresay they'd want the matter kept quiet till it was settled."
Harry's mood of gay contentment, clouded once or twice before, seemed now eclipsed. He sat tapping his boot impatiently with his stick. His father's telegram—or Andy's interpretation of it—clearly did not please him. In the abstract, of course, he had known that he would have a successor in the place which he had given up, or from which he had fallen. It had never entered his head that anybody would suggest Andy Hayes, his old-time worshipper and humble follower. He was not an ungenerous man, but this idea demanded a radical readjustment of his estimate of the relative positions of Andy and himself. If Andy were to succeed to what he had lost, it brought what he had lost very sharply before his eyes.
"Well, if that is the meaning of it, it certainly seems rather—rather a rum start, eh, Andy? New sort of game for you!" He tried to make his voice pleasant.
"It is—it would be—awfully kind of them to think of it," said Andy, now smiling in candid gratification. "And Wigram, as well as your father, was highly complimentary about some of my speeches. But it would be quite out of the question. I've neither the time nor the money."
"It's a deuced expensive game," Harry remarked. "And, of course, no end of work, especially in the next few months. And when you're in, it's not much good in these days, unless you can give all your time to it."
"I know," said Andy, nodding grave appreciation of all these difficulties. "It seems to me quite out of the question. Still, if that is what they mean, I can hardly refuse to discuss it. You see, it's a considerable compliment, anyhow."
He was thinking the idea over in his steady way, and had not paid heed to Harry's altered mood. The objections Harry put forward were so in tune with his own mind that it did not strike him as at all odd that his friend should urge them even zealously. "In any event," he added, "I should have to be guided entirely by what Gilly Foot thought."
"What Gilly thought?"