He could not see the hot tears spring into the old eyes which had not known such a sign of emotion for many years.  But he could feel the throb in the low voice which answered him after a moment.

“I may not deserve that, Dick, but—­it touches me, coming from you.”

When Richard had gone back to his own room, Matthew Kendrick lay for a long time, wide awake, too happy to sleep.  In the next room his grandson, before he slept, had formulated one more new idea: 

“There’s something in the association with people like these that makes a fellow feel like being absolutely honest with them, with everybody—­most of all with himself.  What is it?”

And pondering this, he was lost in the world of dreams.

CHAPTER XVI

ENCOUNTERS

“By the way, Rob, I saw Rich Kendrick to-day.”  Louis Gray detained his sister Roberta on the stairs as they stopped to exchange greetings on a certain evening in March.  “It struck me suddenly that I hadn’t seen him for a blue moon, and I asked him why he didn’t come round when he was in town.  He said he was sticking tight to that new business of his up in Eastman, but he admitted he was to be here over Sunday.  I invited him round to-night, but to my surprise he wouldn’t come.  Said he had another engagement, of course—­thanked me fervently and all that—­but there was no getting him.  It made me a bit suspicious of you, Bobby.”

“I can’t imagine why.”  But, in spite of herself, Roberta coloured.  “He came here when he was helping Uncle Calvin.  There’s no reason for his coming now.”

Her brother regarded her with the observing eye which sisters find it difficult to evade.  “He would have taken a job as nursemaid for Rosy, if it would have given him a chance to go in and out of this old house, I imagine.  Rosy stuck to it, it was his infatuation for the home and the members thereof, particularly Gordon and Dorothy.  He undoubtedly was struck with them—­it would have been a hard heart that wasn’t touched by the sight of the boy—­but if it was the kiddies he wanted, why didn’t he keep coming?  Steve and Rosy would have welcomed him.”

“You had better ask him his reasons, next time you see him,” Roberta suggested, and escaped.

It was two months since she had seen Richard Kendrick.  He seemed never so much as to pass the house, although it stood directly on his course when he drove back and forth from Eastman in his car.  She wondered if he really did make a detour each time, to avoid the very chance of meeting her.  It was impossible not to think of him, rather disturbingly often, and to wonder how he was getting on.