Part 25

"It seems to me--" said the sub-editor.

"Now, Tommy--I mean Jane," warned her Peter Hope. He always called her Jane in company, unless he was excited. "I know what you are going to say. I won't have it."

"I was only going to say--" urged the sub-editor in tone of one suffering injustice.

"I quite know what you were going to say," retorted Peter hotly. "I can see it by your chin. You are going to take their part--and suggest their acting undutifully towards their parents."

"I wasn't," returned the sub-editor. "I was only--"

"You were," persisted Peter. "I ought not to have allowed you to be present. I might have known you would interfere."

"--going to say we are in want of some help in the office. You know we are. And that if Mr. Grindley would be content with a small salary--"

"Small salary be hanged!" snarled Peter.

"--there would be no need for his going to Africa."

"And how would that help us?" demanded Peter. "Even if the boy were so--so headstrong, so unfilial as to defy his father, who has worked for him all these years, how would that remove the obstacle of Mr. Appleyard's refusal?"

"Why, don't you see--" explained the sub-editor.

"No, I don't," snapped Peter.

"If, on his declaring to his father that nothing will ever induce him to marry any other woman but Miss Appleyard, his father disowns him, as he thinks it likely--"

"A dead cert!" was Grindley junior's conviction.

"Very well; he is no longer old Grindley's son, and what possible objection can Mr. Appleyard have to him then?"

Peter Hope arose and expounded at length and in suitable language the folly and uselessness of the scheme.

But what chance had ever the wisdom of Age against the enthusiasm of Youth, reaching for its object. Poor Peter, expostulating, was swept into the conspiracy. Grindley junior the next morning stood before his father in the private office in High Holborn.

"I am sorry, sir," said Grindley junior, "if I have proved a disappointment to you."

"Damn your sympathy!" said Grindley senior. "Keep it till you are asked for it."

"I hope we part friends, sir," said Grindley junior, holding out his hand.

"Why do you irate me?" asked Grindley senior. "I have thought of nothing but you these five-and-twenty years."

"I don't, sir," answered Grindley junior. "I can't say I love you. It did not seem to me you--you wanted it. But I like you, sir, and I respect you. And--and I'm sorry to have to hurt you, sir."

"And you are determined to give up all your prospects, all the money, for the sake of this--this girl?"

"It doesn't seem like giving up anything, sir," replied Grindley junior, simply.

"It isn't so much as I thought it was going to be," said the old man, after a pause. "Perhaps it is for the best. I might have been more obstinate if things had been going all right. The Lord has chastened me."

"Isn't the business doing well, Dad?" asked the young man, with sorrow in his voice.

"What's it got to do with you?" snapped his father. "You've cut yourself adrift from it. You leave me now I am going down."

Grindley junior, not knowing what to say, put his arms round the little old man.