“Not to see him, but to hear him, to feel him. Father is blind.”
“That’s still worse. The boy knows of his trouble?”
She nodded.
“Then why won’t he come?”
“Because of a quarrel. He wrote this.”
She handed the letter to Barnes with a quick motion as though in sudden hope that he might be able to gather from it something she herself had missed. He glanced it through. It was a thoughtless letter. Its whole tone was one of boyish bravado. Barnes flushed as he read it.
“What the boy seems to need,” he commented, “is a cowhiding.”
“I’m afraid he has fallen into bad company,” she apologized for him, but none too heartily.
He checked his own opinion.
“Joe seems almost like a stranger to me,” she confided further. “He has been gone five years now. And the last few years he was at home, I was away at school.”