ought to go.  But it was not felt that the time had come for extreme measures.  It was believed that the newest Whipple should merely be reasoned with.  To this end they began to reason among themselves, and were presently wrangling.  It developed that Sharon’s idea of reasoning lacked subtlety.  It developed that Gideon and Harvey D. reasoned themselves into sheer bewilderment in an effort to find reasons that would commend themselves to Merle; so that this first meeting of the conspirators was about to break up fruitlessly, when Sharon Whipple was inspired to a suggestion that repelled yet pricked the other two until they desperately yielded to it.  This was that none other than Dave Cowan be called into consultation.

“He’ll know more about his own son than we do,” urged Sharon.

Harvey D.’s feeling of true fatherhood was irritated by this way of putting it, but in the end he succumbed.  He felt that his son was now far removed from the sphere of Dave Cowan, yet the man might retain some influence over the boy that would be of benefit to all concerned.

“He’s in town,” said Sharon.  “He’s a world romper, but he’s here now.  I heard him to-day in the post office telling someone how many stars there are in the sky—­or something like that.”

The following afternoon Dave Cowan, busy at the typesetting machine of the Newbern Advance, Daily and Weekly, was again begged to meet a few Whipples in the dingy little office of the First National.  The office was unchanged; it had kept through the years since Dave had last illumined its gloom an air of subdued, moneyed discretion.  Nor had the Whipples changed much.  Harvey D. was still neat-faced and careful of attire, still solicitous of many little things.  Gideon, gaunt and dour, was still erect.  His hair was white now, but the brows shot their questioning glance straight.  Sharon was as he had been, round-chested, plump; perhaps a trifle readier to point the ends of the grizzled brows in choleric amaze.  The Whipple nose on all three still jutted forward boldly.  It was a nose never to compromise with Time.

Dave Cowan, at first glance, was much the same, even after he had concealed beneath the table that half of him which was never quite so scrupulously arrayed as the other.  But a second glance revealed that the yellow hair was less abundant.  It was now cunningly conserved from ear to ear, above a forehead that had heightened.  The face was thinner, and etched with new lines about the orator’s mouth, but the eyes shone with the same light as of old and the same willingness to shed its beams through shadowed places such as first national banks.  He no longer accepted the cigar, to preserve in the upper left-hand waist coat pocket with the fountain pen, the pencil, and the toothbrush.  He craved rather permission to fill and light the calabash pipe.  This was a mere bit of form, for he was soon talking so continuously that the pipe was no longer a going concern.