"Will you have a game, Lucy?"
She looked up from her sewing to smile a negative. "That would be leaving papa quite to his thoughts. I think we had better talk to him."
"Travice," Peter Arkell suddenly said, "I am sure this depression must seriously affect your father."
"Of course it does," was the ready answer. "He has just now had to borrow more money again."
"Then Palmer was right," thought Peter Arkell. "Will he keep on the business?" he asked aloud.
"I should not, were I in his place," said Travice. "He would have given up long ago, I believe, but for thinking what's to become of me. Of course if he does give up, I am thrown on the world, a wandering Arab."
His tone was as much one of jest as of gravity. The young do not see things in the same light as the old. To his father and to Peter Arkell, his being thrown out of the business he had embraced as his own, appeared an almost irrecoverable blight in life; to Travice himself it seemed but a very slight misfortune. The world was before him, and he had honour, education, health, and brains; surely he could win his way in it!
"It is not well to throw down one calling and take up another," observed Peter, thoughtfully. "It does not always answer."
"But if you are forced to it!" argued Travice. "There's no help for it then, and you must do the best you can."
"It is a pity but you had gone to Oxford, Travice, and entered into some profession!"