"I had to see you," he said to Cairns, "but it breaks me up to visit the old place."
"It is waiting for you, Quirk, and we miss you every day. When are you coming back?" the editor asked.
"When I can thrust my innocence in the town's face—perhaps to-morrow, possibly never," Denis answered.
"Nonsense! The scandal is dead and buried. We never realised what you were until you had left us. We want your initiative, Quirk."
"It's very good of you to say that. Lord, how I miss you Cairns—you and the old paper! The 'Freelance' is all right, but it never can be the 'Mercury.' And Grey Town, too! I love it for its very shortcomings," Denis replied.
He interviewed the staff, and parted after a few friendly words with each. The remainder of his time in Grey Town was spent at "Layton" and in the country around the town. His friends were invited to meet him at dinner—Father Healy, Mr. Green, Dr. Marsh, and a few others. Not that he feared to face the town, but because he could not bear to enter it as a mere visitor; to stand, as it were, on one side, as an onlooker and not as a worker.
"You have done wonders, they tell me," he remarked to his father, "but I feel that there is more to be accomplished, and my fingers are itching to be doing it."
"I am just keeping your seat on the Council warm for you. Say the word, and it is yours," remarked Samuel Quirk.
"When the word comes to me, I will send it along to you. Meanwhile, keep firing at them, Dad. Grey Town is yawning and rubbing its eyes. The town is beginning to realise what it is to be awake. In time it will be awake and moving briskly."
"I'll keep on pinching them, until they must be moving just to be quit of my fingers," Samuel Quirk replied complacently. "By the time you are back with us this town will be a young city."