"He would have wished it—he did wish it," he said, after a minute. "I talked with him only a few hours before his death, and he told me then that it was necessary to send for you—that he felt that he had neglected his duty in not bringing you home immediately after your release. He saw at last that it would have been far better to have acted as I strongly advised at the time."
"It was his desire, then, that I should return?" asked Daniel, while a stinging moisture rose to his eyes at the thought that he had not looked once upon the face of the dead man. "I wish I had known."
A slight surprise showed in the other's gesture of response, and he glanced hastily away as he might have done had he chanced to surprise his nephew while he was still without his boots or his shirt.
"I think he realised before he died that the individual has no right to place his personal pride above the family tie," he resumed quietly, ignoring the indecency of emotion as he would have ignored, probably, the unclothed body. "I had said much the same thing to him eight years ago, when I told him that he would realise before his death that he was not morally free to act as he had done with regard to you. As a matter of fact," he observed in his trained, legal voice, "the family is, after all, the social unit, and each member is as closely related as the eye to the ear or the right arm to the left. It is illogical to speak of denying one's flesh and blood, for it can't be done."
So this was why they had received him. He turned his head away, and his gaze rested upon the boughs of the great golden poplar beyond the window.
"It is understood, then," he asked "that I am to come back—back to this house to live?"
When he had finished, but not until then, Richard Ordway looked at him again with his dry, conventional kindness. "If you are free," he began, altering the word immediately lest it should suggest painful associations to his companion's mind, "I mean if you have no other binding engagements, no decided plans for the future."
"No, I have made no other plans. I was working as a bookkeeper in a tobacco warehouse in Tappahannock."
"As a bookkeeper?" repeated Richard, as he glanced down inquiringly at the other's hands.
"Oh, I worked sometimes out of doors, but the position I held was that of confidential clerk."