"Did you ask papa?"
"What's the use? He'll let me do what I please. I guess I'll start in to-morrow."
His father did not interfere when his only son came slouching up to inform him of his decision.
After Jack had gone away toward the village and his new business, his father remained seated on the shabby veranda, his head sunken on his soiled shirtfront, his wasted hands clasped over his stomach.
For a little while, perhaps, he remembered his earlier ambitions for
the boy's career. Maybe they caused him pain. But if there was pain it faded gradually into the lethargy which had settled over him since his wife's death.
A grey veil seemed to have descended between him and the sun,—there was greyness everywhere, and dimness, and uncertainty—in his mind, in his eyesight—and sometimes the vagueness was in his speech. He had noticed that—for, sometimes the word he meant to use was not the word he uttered. It had occurred a number of times, making foolish what he had said.
And Ledlie had glanced at him sharply once or twice out of his sore and faded eyes when Greensleeve had used some word while thinking of another.
When he was not wandering around the house he sat on the veranda in a great splint-bottomed arm-chair—a little untidy figure, more or less caved in from chest to abdomen, which made his short thin legs hanging just above the floor seem stunted and withered.