“I don't know,” she said, in a lighter tone. “Perhaps it's a kind of useless foreboding I seem to have pretty often. It may be that—or it may be poor papa.”
“You ARE a funny, delightful girl, though!” Russell laughed. “When your father's so well again that he goes out walking in the evenings!”
“He does too much walking,” Alice said. “Too much altogether, over at his new plant. But there isn't any stopping him.” She laughed and shook her head. “When a man gets an ambition to be a multi-millionaire his family don't appear to have much weight with him. He'll walk all he wants to, in spite of them.”
“I suppose so,” Russell said, absently; then he leaned forward. “I wish I could understand better why you were 'sadly' happy.”
Meanwhile, as Alice shed what further light she could on this point, the man ambitious to be a “multi-millionaire” was indeed walking too much for his own good. He had gone to bed, hoping to sleep well and rise early for a long day's work, but he could not rest, and now, in his nightgown and slippers, he was pacing the floor of his room.
“I wish I DID know,” he thought, over and over. “I DO wish I knew how he feels about it.”
CHAPTER XVIII
That was a thought almost continuously in his mind, even when he was hardest at work; and, as the days went on and he could not free himself, he became querulous about it. “I guess I'm the biggest dang fool alive,” he told his wife as they sat together one evening. “I got plenty else to bother me, without worrying my head off about what HE thinks. I can't help what he thinks; it's too late for that. So why should I keep pestering myself about it?”
“It'll wear off, Virgil,” Mrs. Adams said, reassuringly. She was gentle and sympathetic with him, and for the first time in many years he would come to sit with her and talk, when he had finished his day's work. He had told her, evading her eye, “Oh, I don't blame you. You didn't get after me to do this on your own account; you couldn't help it.”