Jimmie raised his eyebrows. “Is he coming?”
“Later,” she said. “He’ll be kept at his office—”
“Then I’ll go over.”
“James!” There was a strident note in her voice. She started, twice, to speak imperatively, to demand that he stay. But she could not find the right words—or, if she found them, could not utter them—because he kept looking at her, waiting for anything she might have to say.
His father interrupted this silence. “It is pretty darned, well, selfish of you, son.
We’ve planned the whole weekend for you. Thought, even, you might not feel like starting at the paint works for a month or so. You wrote you’ve been going at it hard.”
Jimmie glanced from face to face, hunting for something he did not find. Then he walked toward the hall, passing close to his sister.
“Cad,” she said softly.
Biff rallied. “I’ll run you over—since you’re going.”
They were riding through the crystalline landscape again. “You’re kind of rough on them,” Biff said. “They’ve built up this homecoming into a fiesta. After all, you’re a legend around here. I suppose they expected something between an adoring undergraduate and a polished English earl.”