“He'll be twenty in May—and Julia is fourteen months older than he is.”
“Gad!” was Thorpe's meditative comment. “How they shoot up! Why I was thinking she was a little girl.” “She never will be tall, I'm afraid,” said the literal mother. “She favours her father's family. But Alfred is more of a Thorpe. I'm sorry you missed seeing them last summer—but of course they didn't stop long with me. This was no place for them—and they had a good many invitations to visit schoolfellows and friends in the country. Alfred reminds me very much of what you were at his age: he's got the same good opinion of himself, too—and he's not a bit fonder of hard work.”
“There's one mighty big difference between us, though,” remarked Thorpe. “He won't start with his nose held down to the grindstone by an old father hard as nails. He'll start like a gentleman—the nephew of a rich man.”
“I'm almost afraid to have such notions put in his head,” she replied, with visible apprehension. “You mustn't encourage him to build too high hopes, Joel. It's speculation, you know—and anything might happen to you. And then—you may marry, and have sons of your own.”
He lifted his brows swiftly—as if the thought were new to his mind. A slow smile stole into the little wrinkles about his eyes. He opened his lips as if to speak, and then closed them again.
“Well,” he said at last, abruptly straightening himself, and casting an eye about for his coat and hat. “I'll be round in the morning—on my way to the City. Good-bye till then.”
CHAPTER IV
IN Charing Cross station, the next afternoon, Mr. Thorpe discovered by the big clock overhead that he had arrived fully ten minutes too soon. This deviation from his deeply-rooted habit of catching trains at the last possible moment did not take him by surprise. He smiled dryly, aud nodded to the illuminated dial, as if they shared the secret of some quaint novelty. This getting to the station ahead of time was of a piece with what had been happening all day—merely one more token of the general upheaval in the routine of his life.
From early morning he had been acutely conscious of the feeling that his old manners and usages and methods of thought—the thousand familiar things that made up the Thorpe he had been—were becoming strange to him. They fitted him no longer; they began to fall away from him. Now, as he stood here on the bustling platform, it was as if they had all disappeared—been left somewhere behind him outside the station. With the two large bags which the porter was looking after—both of a quite disconcerting freshness of aspect—and the new overcoat and shining hat, he seemed to himself a new kind of being, embarked upon a voyage of discovery in the unknown.