"Well, dear Eric, I'm very glad to see you again. You're looking thin," said his mother.
"I'm all right, thanks. How are you, mother? Is the guv'nor working?" asked Eric.
The need for action was strong upon him, and he had to explain once and for all that he aimed at something more than security and a chance of earning money at once.
"He's indoors."
Eric ducked his head and entered the long, low house. It was dark after the glowing June sunlight outside, chillingly cold, too; from the back of the house came the gentle murmur of the Bort with an unchanging drone of falling water and a regular double creak from the mill-wheel, like the slow cadence of a grandfather's clock. Through the open French windows of the dining-room he sniffed the stream's familiar scent of decay, half-smothered by the coarse reek of a blazing patch of marigolds. Lashmar Mill-House was, for Eric, a place where ambition was brought to die.
Without waiting to be disturbed, Dr. Lane rattled open the door of the library and appeared in his shirt-sleeves, fleshless, tall and stooping, with the gentle, brown eyes, black hair and aquiline nose which he had handed down to Eric. An unkempt brown moustache drooped drearily on either side of a long corncob pipe-stem, and his bony hands fidgetted with an untanned strap round his waist.
"I want to have a talk with you," said Eric to his parents. "I'm starting work next week with the London News. Jack and I are going to live together."
Mrs. Lane nursed a well-founded suspicion that Jack preyed on her son's scant vitality, but she shrank from confessing jealousy of his friend.
"Let's have a day or two to think things over," she proposed. "Journalism is very wearing."
"But everything's arranged," Eric answered.