"My boy," said Mr. Biron quietly, placing his hand on his son's shoulder, "I am not lord of a feudal principality. I cannot interfere. You will have to fight your own fights."
"But," said André François, angry tears rushing to his eyes, "I cannot fight this peasant—I am a gentleman." And he drew himself up with a jerk, in his drabbled sailor suit, to his full three feet eight. This assumption of dignity was not without discomfort, for the muddy water from his over-long hair dripped down his neck in the back and into his eyes in the front.
"Of a certainty," affirmed Angélique with finality, "he is a gentleman. Madame Fouchette so raised heem."
"You will have to settle it your own way, Andrew. If you are too good to fight him, and he is not too good to fight you, I do not see what you can do—except run."
"I will not run," cried André François, his voice becoming shrill and childish with impotent rage. "I want him punished."
"I can do nothing for you," said his father shortly. "You had better go home now to your aunt and have your suit changed."
"Allons," said Angélique indignantly, and, catching André François by the hand, she started out. At the door she paused long enough to say devoutly, fixing the so unnatural father with a basilisk glance.
"Dieu vous garde, mon pauvre enfant."
The manager of the White Star even thought he heard a "Bête!" as the door was closed so decisively that one would almost say it was slammed. All of which the so unnatural parent endured with equanimity, and turned to his delayed files with a patient if dubious smile, for he had begun to do his parental duty as he saw it, and anything he began, whether it was a lockout, a new policy, or the training of his son, he saw through to the bitter end.
The next morning, when the White Star manager reached his office—and he got there early, for he began his day's work when his office boy was still comfortably snoring—- he found a small boy leaning against the door in the stiff and resigned position of a guard waiting to be relieved from duty. The only parts of him which moved were the toes of his bare legs, and these nimble members dibbled the clayey earth in front of the door-step.