"Will close a great deal if I stay. Cannot leave for a week at least. Persuade mother to wait."
He then walked to the smoking apartments, where his late associates were trying to forget business.
"I am ready, gentlemen," he observed, in his crisp, convincing manner of speech.
Young John Keene handed the message to the Widow McVeigh. He knew it would hurt, and his arm stole about her shoulders as it did when he was the scamp of the Monk Road gossip.
"I'm tired o' this great noisy city," she faltered, after she had studied the message a long time. "I'm no feelin' meself at all, at all, an' my head hurts. I must be goin' home."
"You shall stay with me, Nancy. Corney will be back in ten days at the least. My wife wishes it, as well as myself, and we want you to see our little Nancy. That's our baby," he said, in lower tones.
Nancy gazed at the hurrying people on the hot pavements below, at the buildings that shot upwards past her line of vision, at the countless windows and tangled wires; then she turned to young John and he knew that she had seen none of them.
"I'll try, Johnny," she answered.
The days that followed were battles with weariness to Nancy McVeigh. She did not complain, but her silence only aggravated the loneliness which had crept into her soul. Young John Keene talked to her, amused her, cajoled her, pleaded with her, and yet her mood was impenetrable. Even tiny Nancy Keene's dimpled fingers could not take away the strange unrest in her eyes. Then, when the ten days had elapsed, a second message came: "Kiss mother and tell her to wait. Can't return for another week. Am writing." Nancy read it and cried; not weakly, like a woman, but with harsh, dry sobs.
"I'll be goin' home in the mornin'," she said, firmly.