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 for strength to meet his present--because he dreaded what we would find at the end of our work on these dusty books, the last grim figure in dollars and cents that would stand there as the result of his life, as the stepping-stone for Sue's and mine. And that was why he wanted me here, this was his way of telling me the story of his business life--before I saw what lay at the end. And as in our work that story unfolded, though at times it cast its spell on me hard, revealing what a man he had been, there were other times when from somewhere deep inside of me a small selfish voice would ask: "What is left? How much has he saved from the wreck? What is this going to mean to my life?"