"You mustn't encourage
him to build too high hopes, Joel. It's speculation,
you know--and anything might happen to you. And then--you
may marry, and have sons of your own."
He lifted his brows swiftly--as if the thought were new
to his mind. A slow smile stole into the little wrinkles
about his eyes. He opened his lips as if to speak,
and then closed them again.
"Well," he said at last, abruptly straightening himself,
and casting an eye about for his coat and hat.
"I'll be round in the morning--on my way to the City.
Good-bye till then."
CHAPTER IV
IN Charing Cross station, the next afternoon,
Mr. Thorpe discovered by the big clock overhead that he
had arrived fully ten minutes too soon. This deviation
from his deeply-rooted habit of catching trains at
the last possible moment did not take him by surprise.
He smiled dryly, aud nodded to the illuminated dial,
as if they shared the secret of some quaint novelty.
This getting to the station ahead of time was of a piece
with what had been happening all day--merely one more token
of the general upheaval in the routine of his life.
From early morning he had been acutely conscious of the
feeling that his old manners and usages and methods
of thought--the thousand familiar things that made up
the Thorpe he had been--were becoming strange to him.
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