“I will attend to these by-and-by,” he said, abruptly; “in the mean time, my young friend, I have something to say to you.”
Then Powys, whose eyes had been fixed upon a dark picture over and beyond, at some distance, Mr. Brownlow’s head, came to himself suddenly, and met the look fixed upon him. The elder man thought there was a little defiance in the glance which the younger cast upon him; but this is one of the things in which one sees always what one is prepared to see. Powys, for his part, was not in the least defiant; he was a little surprised, a little curious, eager to hear and reply, but he was utterly unconscious of the sentiments which the other read in his eyes.
“I thought a little while ago,” said Mr. Brownlow, in his excitement going farther than he meant to go, “that I had found in you one of the best clerks that ever I had.”
Here he stopped for a moment, and Powys regarded him open-mouthed, waiting for more. His frank face clouded over a little when he saw that Mr. Brownlow made a pause. “I was going to say Thank you, sir,” said the young man; “and indeed I do say Thank you; but am I to understand that you don’t think so now?”
“I don’t know what to think,” said Mr. Brownlow. “I take more interest in you than--than I am in the habit of taking in a--in a stranger; but they tell me at the office there is a change, and I see there is a change. It has been suggested to me that you were going to the bad, which I don’t believe; and it has been suggested to me that you had something on your mind--”
The young man had changed color, as indeed he could scarcely help doing; his _amour propre_ was still as lively and as easily excited as is natural to his age. “If you are speaking of my duties in the office, sir,” he said, “you have a perfect right to speak; but I don’t suppose they could be influenced one way or another by the fact that I had something on my mind--”
“I am not speaking to you so much as your employer as--as your friend,” said Mr. Brownlow. “You know the change has been visible. People have spoken about it to me--not perhaps the people you would imagine to have interfered. And I want to speak to you as an old man may speak to a young man--as I should wish, if the circumstances make it needful, any one would speak to my son. Why do you smile?”