"How's that?"
"Can't afford it."
Ben pursed his lips, drummed with his fingers on the arm of the deep comfortable chair. "Well, now, perhaps——"
Charley came in, smiling a watery smile and palpably red-eyed. Her father caught her and hugged the slender shoulder with a paternal and yet quizzical gesture. "Nobody's supposed to notice that Charley's been crying a little. She didn't get a letter from her boy in France and she doesn't feel happy about it." She looked up at him, gratefully. He patted her shoulder, turned pridefully to Ben. "Charley and her poet are going to be married, you know, when this war's over—if it ever is over. Look at her blush! I guess these new-fangled girls have got some old-fashioned ways left, after all, eh, Chas?"
"Yes, Dad."
CHAPTER XVII
They were in the midst of packing and moving when the news came of Jesse Dick's death. She had no formal warning. No official envelope prepared her. And yet she received it with a dreadful calm, as though she had expected it, and had braced herself for it. She and her father were at breakfast surrounded by wooden packing boxes and burlap rolls. Charley, in peril of missing the 8:35 I. C. train, contented herself with the morning's news second-hand. Henry Kemp had the paper.
"What's the daily schrecklichkeit, Dad?"
He had not answered. Suddenly the weight of his silence struck her. She looked up as though he had spoken her name. The open newspaper shielded his face. Something in the way he held it. You do not hold a paper thus when you are reading. "Dad!" The paper came down slowly. She saw his face.
"Dead?"