"If I'd been in this country," he remarked with a return of his old self-assertiveness, "I'd probably be driving a street-car, or picking up cigarette-stubs."
"Why?" enquired Mrs. West, puzzled at the remark.
"You can't jump over a wall when you're wearing leaden soles on your boots," was the terse rejoinder.
"And haven't you sometimes missed not having a mother?" enquired Mrs. West gently, tears in her sympathetic eyes at the thought of this solitary man who had never known the comforts of a home. "She would have been proud of you."
"Would she?" he enquired simply, as he crumbled his cake and threw it to a flurry of birds that was hopefully fluttering on the fringe of the tables.
"A son's success means more to a mother than anything else," said Mrs. West.
"I seem to have been hustling around most of my time," said John Dene. "I'm always working when I'm not asleep. Perhaps I haven't felt it as much——"
He left the sentence uncompleted; but there was a look in his eyes that was not usually there.
Mrs. West sighed with all a mother's sympathy for a lonely man.
"Do you like birds, Mr. Dene?" asked Dorothy.