“That’s the Agnes plant ... way over there ... that blue flame. There!” said Thane.
“I had made it out,” said John.
“What did you call it?” Agnes asked.
Sheepishly they told her that from the beginning, for luck, they had called it the Agnes plant.
“How nice!” she said.
From that their conversation became more personal, even reminiscent. They found they could speak naturally of incidents always until then taboo. They talked of Enoch, of their arrival and beginning in Pittsburgh, of the mill at Damascus which was doing well, and of each other, how they had changed and what it was like to be all grown up.
When Agnes rose to leave she shook hands with John, saying: “Alexander will give you the key. We don’t press you. But it’s there for you whenever you have the impulse to come. Day or night. Any time. And even if you never come it will please us to keep it always ready for you.”
With that she was gone, so suddenly that John had been unable to get any words together. He had not even said good-night.
“That place we’ve fixed for you means something,” said Thane, lunging out of a silence. “I can’t find any way to say it. We know how it was when you brought us to Pittsburgh and how there wasn’t any job for us until you bought the little nail mill. We know all about it. It’s lucky for all of us,—lucky for Agnes and me, I mean,—I didn’t know enough to see it then. There ain’t no way to say how we feel about it. You can just understand that’s what this key means.”
John took it, turned it over in his hand, then put it in his pocket and said nothing.