My father shut himself up with me for half an hour and examined me himself.
“It's very curious, Paul,” he said, “you seem to know a good deal.”
“They asked me all the things I didn't know. They seemed to do it on purpose,” I blurted out, and laid my head upon my arm. My father crossed the room and sat down beside me.
“Spud!” he said—it was a long time since he had called me by that childish nickname—“perhaps you are going to be with me, one of the unlucky ones.”
“Are you unlucky?” I asked.
“Invariably,” answered my father, rumpling his hair. “I don't know why. I try hard—I do the right thing, but it turns out wrong. It always does.”
“But I thought Mr. Hasluck was bringing us such good fortune,” I said, looking up in surprise. “We're getting on, aren't we?”
“I have thought so before, so often,” said my father, “and it has always ended in a—in a collapse.”
I put my arms round his neck, for I always felt to my father as to another boy; bigger than myself and older, but not so very much.
“You see, when I married your mother,” he went on, “I was a rich man. She had everything she wanted.”