Arnold looked at him thoughtfully.
“Really, it’s very difficult. I don’t know.... You do so muddle things up, don’t you? I wish you’d learn to do only one job at once and stick to it.”
Eddy said bitterly, “It won’t stick to me, unfortunately.”
Arnold said, “If Uncle Wilfred would have you, would you come to us?”
Eddy supposed he would. Only probably Uncle Wilfred wouldn’t have him. Later in the evening he got a telegram to say that his father had had a stroke, and could he come home at once. He caught a train at half-past eight, and was at Welchester by ten.
CHAPTER XI.
THE COUNTRY.
THE Dean was paralysed up the right side, his wife agitated and anxious, his daughter cross.
“It’s absurd,” said Daphne to Eddy, the morning after his arrival. “Father’s no more sense than a baby. He insists on bothering about some article he hasn’t finished for the Church Quarterly on the Synoptic Problem. As if one more like that mattered! The magazines are too full of them already.”
But the Dean made it obvious to Eddy that it did matter, and induced him to find and decipher his rough notes for the end of the article, and write them out in proper form. He was so much better after an afternoon of that that the doctor said to Eddy, “How long can you stop at home?”
“As long as I can be any use. I have just given up one job and haven’t begun another yet, so at present I am free.”