“Half-past five be it,” said Reuben, turning back again to his desk.
Horace made his way across the muddy high street and found his father, who smelt rather more of tobacco than could have been wished, but otherwise was in complete readiness.
“By the way,” remarked the young man, as the two walked briskly along, “I’ve given Tracy notice that I’m going to leave the firm. I daresay we shall separate almost immediately. The business hasn’t been by any means up to my expectations, and, besides, I have too much already to do for the Minster estate, and am by way, now, of having a good deal more.”
“I’m sorry, for all that,” said the General. “Tracy is a first-rate, honest, straightforward fellow. It always did me good to feel that you were with him. To tell you the truth, my boy,” he went on after a pause, “I’m damnably uneasy about your being so thick with Tenney and that gang, and separating yourself from Tracy. It has an unsafe look.”
“Tracy is a tiresome prig,” was Horace’s comment. “I’ve stood him quite long enough.”
The conversation turned now upon the object of their expedition, and when this had been explained to the General, and his part in it outlined, he had forgotten his forebodings about his son’s future.
That son himself, as he strode along, with his head well up and his shoulders squared, was physically an object upon which the paternal eye could look with entire pride. The General said to himself that he was not only the best-dressed, but the handsomest young fellow in all Dearborn County; and from this it was but a mental flash to the recollection that the Boyces had always been handsome fellows, and the old soldier recalled with satisfaction how well he himself had felt that he looked when he rode away from Thessaly at the head of his regiment after the firing on Fort Sumter.
Mrs. Minster came down alone to the drawingroom to receive her visitors, and showed by her manner some surprise that the General accompanied his son.
“I rather wanted to talk with you about what you learned at Pittsburg,” she said, somewhat bluntly, to Horace, after conversation on ordinary topics had begun to flag.
The General rose at this. “Pray let me go into the library for a time, I beg of you,” he said, in his courtly, cheery manner. “I know the way, and I can amuse myself there till you want me; that is,” he added, with a twinkle in his eye, “if you decide that you want me at all.”