“He did look tired,” Mrs. Peyton conceded. “I meant to tell him to take care of himself.”
Dick laughed at the futility of the measure. “Old Paul is never tired: he can work twenty-five hours out of the twenty-four. The trouble with him is that he’s ill. Something wrong with the machinery, I’m afraid.”
“He wouldn’t listen to me when I suggested it the other day; but he’s so deuced mysterious that I don’t know what he may have done since.” Dick rose, putting down his coffee-cup and half-smoked cigarette. “I’ve half a mind to pop in on him to-night and see how he’s getting on.”
“But he lives at the other end of the earth; and you’re tired yourself.”
“I’m not tired; only a little strung-up,” he returned, smiling. “And besides, I’m going to meet Gill at the office by and by and put in a night’s work. It won’t hurt me to take a look at Paul first.”
Mrs. Peyton was silent. She knew it was useless to contend with her son about his work, and she tried to fortify herself with the remembrance of her own words to Darrow: Dick was a man and must take his chance with other men.
But Dick, glancing at his watch, uttered an exclamation of annoyance. “Oh, by Jove, I shan’t have time after all. Gill is waiting for me now; we must have dawdled over dinner.” He went to give his mother a caressing tap on the cheek. “Now don’t worry,” he adjured her; and as she smiled back at him he added with a sudden happy blush: “She doesn’t, you know: she’s so sure of me.”
Mrs. Peyton’s smile faded, and laying a detaining hand on his, she said with sudden directness: “Sure of you, or of your success?”
He hesitated. “Oh, she regards them as synonymous. She thinks I’m bound to get on.”
He shrugged laughingly, but with a slight contraction of his confident brows. “Why, I shall have to make way for some one else, I suppose. That’s the law of life.”
Mrs. Peyton sat upright, gazing at him with a kind of solemnity. “Is it the law of love?” she asked.
He looked down on her with a smile that trembled a little. “My dear romantic mother, I don’t want her pity, you know!”
Dick, coming home the next morning shortly before daylight, left the house again after a hurried breakfast, and Mrs. Peyton heard nothing of him till nightfall. He had promised to be back for dinner, but a few moments before eight, as she was coming down to the drawing-room, the parlour-maid handed her a hastily pencilled note.