“I am afraid, Eddy, you are a very reckless boy.”
“Rather,” he said, with an uneasy and embarrassed laugh; “but I am going to turn over a new leaf, and not be so any more.”
A tender impulse moved the woman, who had a faint underlying recollection which she could not quite quench, though she was ashamed of it, that she might have been Eddy’s mother. “I am not very rich in my own person,” she said, “though my husband is: but if there is anything, Eddy, that I could do, or James either, I am sure——”
“Oh, good heavens!” cried Eddy, under his breath. “Don’t, for pity’s sake, say such a thing to me,” he cried. “You don’t know how it hurts—what an unutterable cad it makes me feel.”
“Why?” she asked, with a smile; but she did not pursue the subject. “I wish you could stay a little longer. If Archie does not come home in a day or two, my husband will sadly want some one to cheer him. I wish you could stay.”
“Is Archie coming home in a day or two?”
“I don’t know,” she said, faltering. “I can’t tell—I hope so with all my heart. I need not try to hide from you, Eddy, that his father and he—have had a disagreement.”
“Mrs. Rowland, don’t think me impertinent: can you tell me what it was about?”
“It is their secret, not mine,” she said; then with a troubled smile, “You know what fathers and sons most generally disagree about?”
“Money,” he said, with so disturbed a look, that Mrs. Rowland felt in her heart she had been unjust in thinking Eddy callous to anything that did not concern himself.