Jack was silent for some time. "It seems a rotten state of things," he observed at length, and his father laughed aloud.
Darwen was on shift when they arrived, but Jack took his father to their diggings, and very soon after Darwen came in; his handsome face lighted up with a beaming smile as he shook hands with the Reverend Hugh. "I say," he said, "I should have known you for Jack's father if I had met you in the street alone."
The old parson smiled with approval as his shrewd grey eyes took in a complete impression of face and form and expression. He succumbed at once to the charming manner and charming personality of the tall, clean-looking young engineer. "Wholesome, athletic, happy-go-lucky, but intelligent," was his mental summing up. Such were the sort of friends he expected his son to make; he looked from one to the other with keen approval. They pushed forward the easiest chair and plied him with cushions and tobacco. They took him back to his own college days.
"You fellows seem very comfortable here," he said.
"Not bad," they agreed.
He smiled. "It was always 'not bad,'" he said. "Hullo!" he glanced along the backs of the books on the shelf at his side. "Tennyson, Keats, Dante, Shelley, 'Hamlet,' 'Julius Cæsar,' 'Barrack Room Ballads,' 'The Prince'! I didn't know you had a fancy for poetry, Jack."
"Not guilty! Those are Darwen's." Jack was stretched out, six feet of muscularity, full length on a slender-looking couch. He puffed slowly at his pipe. "Those are mine"—he pointed to a shelf on the other side.
His father glanced along the backs of them, reading the names aloud. "'Dynamo, Electric Machinery,' h-m, bulky volume that! 'Manual of the Steam Engine'; 'The Steam Engine,' h-m, three volumes. 'Polyphase Currents,' ah! 'Text Book of Heat,' 'Theoretical Chemistry,' 'Trigonometry,' 'Integral Calculus,' 'Differential Calculus' (Todhunter). That's mine, I think. I thought Edwards was the man on the Calculus nowadays."
"Ye-es, Darwen's got him somewhere. I prefer Todhunter, leaves more to the imagination, you know."
"Ah, the imagination. Quite so."