Joyce noted now, as she had more than once before, since Hillcrest training had given her a certain power of discrimination, her father's style of speaking.
"What happened, father, before you came here?" she asked quickly. Her directness, and the slight she paid to his personal reflections, ruffled Jared's complacency. He was not ready to confess more than was absolutely necessary.
"Just one of them misunderstandings," he replied, slipping into St. Angé's carelessness of speech, "that happens now and again to any young man with a fine taste and slim purse. A matter of business! I always calculated to go back and make it straight, after the first flash had passed and I had money enough. I never give up or got discouraged. It was your mother losing grip sort of set me back; and then your raising and expenses here, kinder held me down. But the spirit in me has soared nevertheless."
"Sometimes it seems to me," Joyce's eyes grew dreamy, "that every one in St. Angé has something to keep still about. Every one seems to be here because he has to, not because he wants to. People seem to drift in here like logs after a spring freshet—and they get jammed."
Jared laughed. The idea caught his fancy.
"You've hit it, Joyce!" he said, "You've hit it all right. Jammed, by damn! that's it; but to carry the simile further, when the jam is loosened up, there's going to be some logs as gets away."
"Where could we go, father, and how?"
The pleading intensity of the girl encouraged Jared. He refilled his pipe, imagined himself in the mirror trimmed up and fashionably attired, and then drove his axe to the heart of the matter.
"When all's said and done, girl," he began, "I've been a pretty good dad to you. Given you years of schooling and stood by you when I might have skipped and led my own life. Many a man with his wife dead, and a kid on his hands, has done it. I've worked for you, and given you the best home in St. Angé; and now if you let me play the cards that you've got in your hands, we'll get out of this and live in clover to the end o' time."
"I don't know what you mean," Joyce gasped.