Thus, then, he came at last to his father's door, waited impatiently for the maid to open it, dropped his bag in the little hall, and turned impulsively to the figure of Mr. Kestern irresolute in the study door.
"Dad," he cried, "it is good to see you again! How are you? How's mother?"
"Oh, Paul!"
The love, the sorrow, the yearning of Mrs. Kestern's cry stabbed him suddenly and unexpectedly to the heart. She had rushed past her husband and flung her arms about his neck. Emotion welling up in him, he bent his head to kiss her, and felt the hot tears on her cheek.
"Oh, my boy, my boy.... You've come at last, Paul. Oh, my son, you'll never doubt your mother's love for you, will you? Kiss your father, Paul. I cannot lose either of my men."
Paul was already bewildered. The pathos of her grip on his arm, and the significance of her eagerness to see the greeting between him and his father, were not lost upon him. His mother clinging to him, he turned to his father, who had not stirred.
"Of course I've come, mother darling," he said. "But I've been terribly busy, you know. And it's awfully jolly seeing you and daddy again. (He used the childish word unconsciously.) How are you, father?"
The man moved a little and brushed his son's lips. Paul perceived in a moment that he had aged. Fear slipped suddenly into his mind. He peered a little to see his father's eyes, and then, with something like a catch in his heart, and with a deliberate blindness, pushed them before him into the study. "Oh, it is jolly to be back," he cried again, but with simulated enthusiasm now, refusing to admit what he had seen, stifling his growing apprehension.
Mr. Kestern seated himself in his revolving chair in front of the bureau. His Bible lay open upon it. Paul caught a glimpse of the underlinings, the "railway-lines," the added red and black of the almost microscopic notes in the neat handwriting he knew so well. He looked swiftly round. The case of stuffed birds, the books, the framed portraits, a print of John G. Paton, missionary in the New Hebrides—nothing had changed. His eye fell on a text, the letters of which had been cut out separately with a fretsaw, hung on an invisible thread, and draped on the wall above the bureau. "Jesus Himself drew near and went with them." That was new; and yet, yet, how old! The old Claxted; the old faith; the old obstinate unchanging evangelicalism that was already a lifetime old to him.
"How are all your new friends?" asked his father.