“Hadn’t we better go for a walk?” she asked.
“No—please——”
“Oh, very well,” with a tone of resignation. “There—you see, I’m submitting again. At four, then. Good-by.” She cut off and he hung up the receiver, sitting for a long while motionless, looking out of the window. He took out his watch and was examining it impatiently when the chief clerk came in.
“Mr. Kenyon will see you now, Mr. Gallatin,” he said.
John Kenyon paused in the reading of his mail and looked up over the half-moons in his glasses when Gallatin appeared at the door.
“Come in, Phil,” he said quietly, offering his hand. He sat down at his desk again and formally indicated the chair nearest it. His manner was kindly and full of an old-fashioned dignity, indicating neither indifference nor encouragement, and this seemed to make Philip Gallatin’s position if anything more difficult and painful. Instead of sitting, Gallatin turned toward the window and stood there.
“I’ve come back, Uncle John,” he muttered.
Kenyon glanced up at him, the calm judicial glance of a man who, having no venal faults himself, tolerates them in others with difficulty. There was no family relationship between the men, and Gallatin’s use of the familiar term at this time meant much, and something in Phil Gallatin’s pose arrested Kenyon’s eye, the jaw that had worked forward and was now clamped tightly by its throbbing muscles, the bulk of the squared shoulders and the decision with which one hand clasped the chair-back.
“I’m glad of that, Phil,” he said. “I was on the point of thinking you had given me up.”
“I had. I had given you up. I haven’t been down here because I knew it wasn’t necessary for me to come and because I thought you’d understand.”