“I liked Sage Portlock—I always did like her, my boy; and as you are getting on so well, and don’t want the money I’ve scraped up for you, I wouldn’t mind helping her in her trouble.”
“It’s very good of you, father,” said the young man, smiling sadly.
“But it would be like pouring money into a well if her husband gets hold of it.”
“If it is a case such as you describe, father,” said Luke, thoughtfully, “I doubt whether money would be of much good.”
The old man looked very anxiously at his son, even with a kind of awe, as if he were afraid of him.
“I don’t like to ask him,” he muttered, “I don’t like to ask him;” and he took out his old faded handkerchief and began nervously wiping his hands upon it, till Luke, in his abstraction, turned his eyes upon him with a vacant look that gradually became intense, as his father grew more nervous and troubled of mien.
As the old man shrank and avoided the gaze which drew him back, as it were, to look appealingly in the stern, searching eyes of his son, Luke spoke to him with the sharpness of one trying to master an evading witness, so that the old man started as the young barrister exclaimed—
“What is it, father? You are keeping something back.”
“I—I hardly liked to say it, my boy. Don’t be angry with me.”
“Angry with you! What nonsense, father. But speak out. What is it? You want to say something to me.”