He felt his attitude towards Van Patten changing. The keen sentences which he had framed by the bedside of the sick father lost their edge with every foot he neared her. All the passion and bitterness went from them. There still remained the fact of the thoughtless wording of the letter, but he seemed to be less and less the man to play the judge upon it. This man by his side was not he whom he had pictured by the letter-box. Yet he kept repeating to himself that the son had not come back at a sick man’s call; that he had left his father to his loneliness. There still remained the duty, which surely fell upon him rather than her, of telling this man what had happened. He braced himself to this task.
“Lord,” exclaimed Van Patten after they had proceeded the matter of a hundred rods in silence, “father will be surprised. Eleanor wrote that his eyes had gone back on him. It’s hard luck to be blind at such a time of year, isn’t it?”
“I think there’s also a bit of a surprise waiting for you,” said Barnes.
The boy stopped in his tracks.
“A surprise?” he repeated anxiously. “You don’t mean to tell me that father—that anything—”
“He has partially recovered his sight,” put in Barnes, glad to relieve the look in the young man’s eyes.
Van Patten dropped his suit-case. He took out a handkerchief and ran it over his forehead.
“Gad!” he exclaimed. “You frightened me. But that—why, that’s the best news ever. That’s something like.”
“There’s still another surprise,” began Barnes. “I—perhaps we’d better sit down here by the side of the road a minute. There are two or three things you ought to know before you see your father.”
“What’s that?”