For he was going back to boarding school; and old memories were uneasily astir again; and Cleland Senior saw the shadow on the boy's face; understood; but now chose to remain silent, not intervening.
So memory gently enveloped them both, leaving them very still together, there in the library.
For the boy's mother had been so intimately associated with preparations for returning to school in those blessed days which already had begun to seem distant and a little unreal to Cleland Junior—so tenderly and vitally a part of them—that now, when the old pain, the loneliness, the eternal desire for her was again possessing father and son in the imminence of familiar departure, Cleland Senior let it come to the boy, not caring to avert it.
Thinking of the same thing, both sat gazing into the back yard. There was a cat on the whitewashed fence. Lizzie, the laundress—probably the last of the race of old-time family laundresses—stood bare-armed in the cold, pinning damp clothing to the lines, her Irish mouth full of wooden clothes-pins, her parboiled arms steaming.
At length Cleland Senior's glance fell again upon the tall clock. He swallowed nothing, stared grimly at the painted dial where a ship circumnavigated the sun, then squaring his big shoulders he rose with decision.
The boy got up too.
In the front hall they assisted each other with overcoats; the little, withered butler took the boy's luggage down the brown-stone steps to the car. A moment later father and son were spinning along Fifth Avenue toward Forty-second Street.
As usual, this ordeal of departure forced John Cleland to an unnatural, off-hand gaiety at the crisis, as though the parting amounted to nothing.
"Going to be a good kid in school, Jim?" he asked, casually humorous.
The boy nodded and smiled.