"Now I must go down to the office to see my father," Vickers said finally.
"I'll be back early in the afternoon, and then—we will make our plans."
"Will you tell him, your father?" Mrs. Conry asked tensely.
"He will have to know, of course." As he spoke a wave of pain shot over the young man's face. He stepped to the door and then turned:—
"You will telegraph about Delia,—she might meet us in New York—in two days."
"Very well," Mrs. Conry murmured submissively.
* * * * *
The Colonel was sitting in his little corner office before the old-fashioned dingy desk, where he had transacted so many affairs of one sort or another for nearly thirty years. He was not even reading his mail this morning, but musing, as he often was when the clerks thought that he was more busily employed. Isabelle and her child had returned from California, the day before. She had not recovered from bearing the child, and the St. Louis doctors who had been consulted had not helped her. It might be well to see some one in New York…. But the Colonel was thinking most of all this morning of his son. The tenacious old merchant was wondering whether he had done right in accepting the young man's sacrifice. In his disgust for the do-nothing, parasitic offspring about him, perhaps he had taken a delicate instrument and blunted it by setting it at coarse work. Well, it was not too late to change that.
'The boy didn't start right,' the Colonel mused sadly. 'He didn't start selling hardware on the road. He's done his best, and he's no such duffer as Parrott's boy anyhow. But he would make only a front office kind of business man. The business must get on by itself pretty soon. Perhaps that idea for a selling company would not be a bad thing. And that would be the end of Parrott and Price.'
Nevertheless, the old man's heart having come slowly to this generous decision was not light,—if the other boy had lived, if Belle had married some one who could have gone into the business. The bricks and mortar of the building were part of his own being, and he longed to live out these last few years in the shadow of his great enterprise….
"Father, can I see you about something important?"