“I sha'n't keep you a minute,” said Tommy, and left the room feeling not so much disappointed as dazed by his own inability to empty himself of all the love he had firmly intended to pour upon his father's head. And then, possibly because of the instinctive craving for a reason, he recalled that his father seemed more aged. “Worry!” thought Tommy. He felt a pang of pity that changed sharply into fear. “Poor dad!” he thought, and then the fear spurred him into the fighting mood. He would stand by his father. He would assure him of his loyalty. They would fight together. He found Mr. Leigh leaning back in his armchair before the table on which stood the silver-framed photograph of Tommy's mother. There was a suggestion of weariness in the old man's attitude, but on Tommy's entrance he rose quickly to his feet and, without looking at Tommy, said: “Dinner is ready, Thomas.” They left the library together, but at the head of the stairs Mr. Leigh stepped aside to let Tommy go first. Tommy obeyed instinctively. The old man followed. “It feels good to be back, dad,” said Tommy. “It seems to me that I really have not been away from this house more than a day or two.” He turned his head to look at his father's face, and stumbled so that he almost fell. Mr. Leigh, his face terror-stricken, reached out his hand to catch his son. “Tom--” he gasped. Then as Tommy recovered himself his father remarked, quietly, “You should not try to do two things at once, Thomas.” Tommy could see that Maggie had strongly impressed upon the cook the fact that Master Thomas had favorite dishes; but neither she nor his father made any allusions to them. It made Tommy almost smile. The reason he didn't was that part of him did not at all feel like smiling. They must have cost money that his father wished to save. So, instead, he talked of Dayton and his friends, and his desire to have his father know them, at which his father nodded gravely. But when Tommy said: “Now, Mr. Thompson wanted me to come to New York to--” Mr. Leigh interrupted. “After dinner, Thomas, you will tell me all about it while you smoke.” “I don't smoke,” said Tommy, with the proud humility of a martyr. But his father said nothing, and Tommy wondered whether the old man, not being himself a smoker, understood. After dinner, in order that his father might understand the situation as it was, Tommy spoke in detail about Thompson--an elaborate character sketch to which his father listened gravely, nodding appreciatively from time to time. Occasionally Mr. Leigh frowned, and Tommy, seeing this, explained how those were the new business ideals of the great West, where Americanism was more robust than in the East--as though Tommy himself had been born and brought up west of the Rockies. “And so I am going to try to place the two thousand shares of Tecumseh stock among personal friends. I'm going to see Rivington Willetts to-morrow morning--”