And Vickers, too, was glad to go. A quiet countryside in spring promised happier opportunities for tête-à-têtes with Nellie than New York had afforded him. Every day in the course of the past two weeks he had felt irked and humiliated by his position, and had been strongly tempted to slip away. Perhaps if escape had looked more difficult he would have been more likely to try it, but it was too easy to excite his interest. And, though it seemed always possible to him that the next day would be the last, his reasons for staying grew, without his realizing it, more and more powerful. Not only his feeling for Nellie held him--for indeed there were times when the prospect of putting her once and for all out of his life seemed very desirable to him,--but also old Mr. Lee’s feeling for him. The old man had not commanded Vickers’s attachment, hardly his respect. He was small-minded, irritable, petty, at times beyond endurance. He was ungrateful, almost unkind to Nellie, but there could be no doubt of his passionate, unqualified devotion to his only son. The one and only thing he cared for was the well-being and companionship of the man he supposed to be his boy. The idea of the pain his going would inflict held Vickers more perhaps than anything else. The patience with which the old man hid his eagerness for the younger one’s society, lest he should be a drag upon him, the amount of thought he devoted to Vickers’s plans, the pride he took in Vickers’s popularity were all inexpressibly touching to a man who had never been the object of parental tenderness. When Nellie and Emmons and his clerkship were more than usually trying, Vickers would tell himself that the whole thing was absurd. Why should he stay for the sake of an old man who had no claim upon him whatsoever? And yet he stayed. If he had felt the bond in New York he felt it twenty times more when they had moved to Hilltop. They arrived at Hilltop about five in the afternoon, and tired as he was, Mr. Lee insisted on walking out a little way over the farm to show it to his son. “It will all be yours, Bob, before long. To be sure, it does not pay as it used to, but it’s a fine property.” Vickers cordially agreed; and even after Mr. Lee had gone back he continued his inspection. Vickers had been trained to farming. He had not been half an hour on the place before he realized that there was there a magnificent property badly if not actually dishonestly mismanaged. Mr. Lee was not a farmer, and had left his land entirely in the hands of his head-man. Vickers saw an opportunity for efficient work before him. This prospect held him, too. He came in very late for dinner, silent as a dog following a scent, quiet as a cat about to spring; abstracted, in short, as a practical man just before action.