"Poems?" My father's look was tragic.

"No."

And I tried to explain what I had been doing. But my attempts to tell
him of my work in Paris were as forced and as pathetic as his efforts to
attend. More and more halting grew our talk, and it ended in a silence
that seemed to have no end. Then I went to the fireplace, knocked the
ashes out of my pipe, refilled it and relit it. When I returned he was
reading his book, and with deep relief I took up mine. That much of it
was over.

But again I found myself watching him. What was in my father's mind? Why
this anxious almost humble tone? It made me wince, it made me ashamed. I
sat there all evening pretending to read and feeling that he was doing
the same.

"Good night, dad--I think I'll go to bed." Even this little came
clumsily. I had never called him "dad" before.

"Good night, my boy. See you at breakfast."

"Yes, sir."

I glanced back as I turned down the hall and saw him staring after me.

What was it he was thinking?

CHAPTER II

"I'm closing out my business, son," he told me the next morning. Here
was another sharp surprise. I did not look at him as I asked:

"Why are you doing that, sir?"

"It's a long story. Times have changed and I'm getting old."

Again I felt suddenly drawn to him. He was old and no mistake. Why had I
never known him till now?

"Look here--Dad." The last word still came awkwardly. "Can't I possibly
be any help down there?" He shot an anxious look at me:

"Why, yes. Glad to have you. I still have a young clerk, but I'd rather
have you."

Only one clerk! What had gone wrong with his business?

But that day in his warehouse, which was empty now and silent, the mere
ghost of what it had been, he seemed in no hurry to show me. On the
contrary, he went back to the ledgers of his earliest years in business,
on the flimsy pretext of looking up certain figures and dates. He did
not need me here, the work he gave me was absurd, I was simply taking
the musty books from their piles in the closet and arranging them by
years on the floor. "To save time," he said. But he himself was still on
that first ledger, stopping to talk, to ramble off from the pages before
him. What did it mean? As the days wore on and he still delayed and at
night that strange humility crept again into his eyes, with a slowly
deepening suspense I came to feel that instead of saving time my father
was trying to make it, to go far back into his vigorous past