Having taken his hat and stick, Tad strode off, turning only on the doorstep. "But there's one thing I'll say right now. If you've got a job at Meek and Brokenshire's I'll damn well have a better one. I'm going to keep my eye on you."
Tom laughed, good-naturedly. "That's the very best thing you could do. Nothing would please your father half so well. You'd buck him up, and at the same time get your knife into me."
As the door closed behind Tad Miss Nash came forward from somewhere in the obscurity. She was in that tremulous ecstasy which the mere sight of Tom always roused in her. She was so very sorry, but Mrs. Whitelaw wasn't able to receive him. If Tom would leave his package with her she would see that it was delivered.
On the next afternoon as Tom was leaving the office Whitelaw offered him a lift uptown. In the seclusion of the limousine the father spoke of Tad.
"He's a great care to me, but somehow I feel that you might do him good."
"He wouldn't let me. I can't get near him, except by force."
"But force is what he respects. In the bottom of his heart he respects you."
"What he needs is a job—the smallest job you could offer him in the bank. If you could put it to him as a sporting proposition that he was to get ahead of me...."
"That's what I'll try to do."
In the course of a few days the lift uptown had become a custom. Though he had never received instructions to that effect, Mr. Phips so shaped Tom's duties that he found himself leaving the office at the same moment as the banker. Once or twice when things did not so happen Whitelaw came into the room where Tom was at work to look for him. If no one else saw it Mr. Phips did, that the lift uptown was the big minute of the banker's day.