His son moved, flushing through his pallor.
"I wish you would not put it that way, sir," he objected.
"There is no other way. I have been wrong and I have no control over you; will you come home?"
There was no other argument but that that could have succeeded, and the three who knew Lestrange knew that could not fail.
"You want me because I am a Ffrench," David rebelled in the final protest. "You have a substitute."
"Perhaps I want you otherwise. And we will not speak in passion; there can be no substitute for you."
"Ffrench and Ffrench," murmured Dick coaxingly. "We can run that factory, Lestrange!"
"There's more than steering-knuckles needing your eye on them. And you love the place, Mr. David," said Bailey from his corner.
From one to the other David's glance went, to rest on Emily's delicate, earnest face in its setting of yellow-bronze curls. Full and straight her dark eyes answered his, the convent-bred Emily's answer to his pride and old resentment and new reluctance to yield his liberty.
"After all, you were born a Ffrench," she reminded, her soft accents just audible. "If that is your work?"