It began with my arrival on the dock, where Sterling Barry had come to meet his daughter. I had seen him often enough before, though I had never known him otherwise than in the way called touch-and-go. A ruddy, portly, handsome fellow of sixty-odd, with eyes that had passed on their torch to his daughter’s, he must in early life have been retiring and diffident, for his general approach now had that forced jovial note that verges on the boisterous.
“Hello! Hello!” he cried, as he lilted up to where I stood with Lovey in the Custom House Section M. “Alive and kicking, what? Couldn’t kill you. Tried, didn’t they?” he went on, looking me over. “Not but what it might have been worse, of course. Billy Townsend’s son’ll never come back at all, poor chap. Fine young fellow, with a bee in his bonnet about aviation. Would go—and now you see! Well, we’ve got you back and we’re going to keep you. What do you know about that?”
I replied that as things were I was afraid I had no choice but to stay.
“And if you want a job come to me. Some big things doing. Country never so prosperous. Lots of business for every one—even for poor old nuts like us. Well, so long! Come and see us. Mrs. Barry will want to hear you talk. Awfully keen on the war, she is, and that sort of thing. Bit down in the mouth now over this Rumania business. Sad slump that, very.”
I said that it only left the more for us to do.
“Got your hands full, what? They do seem to put it over on you, don’t they? Ah, well, we won’t see you licked. We’ll keep out of the war as war; but you’ve got our sympathy. Watchful waiting—that’s the new ticket, you know. Can do a lot with that.”
With his light, dancing step he was waltzing away again when he suddenly returned.
“Mrs. Barry’ll have something to tell you,” he said, with a gleam in his eye curiously like that in Regina’s. “Perhaps you know it already. Regina may have given you the tip, what? People get confidential on board ship. Nothing else to do. No fuss and feathers about it. They don’t want that. War-time spirit, you know. Just telling a few of our friends. Don’t mind saying that Mrs. Barry and I are mighty delighted. Been like our own son for years. Sorry when it came to nothing last time; but look at ’em now!” He pointed to Section B, where Cantyre was bending over Regina as I had bent over her last night. “Can see from here what it means. Get your congratulations by and by.”
Of all this the point is that I couldn’t say a word. I couldn’t tell him there on the dock that I didn’t mean to let it go any farther, nor did he suspect for a second that I had more than an outsider’s interest in the romance. I felt awkward and cowardly at remaining dumb, but neither time nor place admitted of a protest.