It was in the “library” that they had this talk—­an immense and appalling room, all very new oak panelling and very new, uniform sets of volumes bound in red leather and gold, with crests and bookplates, bleakly glittering behind glass doors.  Peter senior tried to kill time there, because a library seemed to his daughter the right background for a father, and Peter junior, who had saved mother’s poor old furniture for his own rooms, found it singularly difficult to open his heart between walls that smelled of money and newness.  However, he did his best to blunder out the offer of himself; while the chill gleam in his father’s eyes (so remarkably like that of the bookcase glass doors) made him feel, as he went on, that he must have begun all wrong.

“So you don’t trust your own father?” was the answer he got when he stopped, as one might be stopped short by the sharp edge of a marble mantelpiece when trying to find the way across a dark room.

“Don’t—­trust you?” stammered Peter, sure now that he was a fool not to understand, not to have made his father understand.

“You think the old man’s got past running his own business, and if you don’t want your money to go to the dogs you must look after it yourself.”

“Good heavens, no!” Peter broke out.  “You can’t dream that any such thought entered my mind!  I—­why, Father, I’d rather die than have you believe that of me.”

“Prove I’m wrong, then,” said the elder dryly, pulling, as was his habit, a thin, grizzled beard with thin, sallow fingers.  “You can do it easy enough.”

“How?  Only tell me.”

“By turning your attention to other things, my boy.  Leave me alone to manage what I know how to manage.  You let me do it my own way, without shoving in your oar, and don’t you listen to what any of your highbrow friends say about me and my methods behind my back.”

“As if I would!”

“Well, I wasn’t sure.  You go with a set of raw boys who think they know better than their fathers how to run creation; and now and then you blow off some of those soap-bubble ideas in your conversation.  I’ve been kind of hurt once in a while, though I didn’t let it out.  But now we’re on the subject I will say:  if you’ve got faith in the old man, hands off the Hands!”

“That settles it, Father,” returned Peter heavily.  “I never meant to hinder, only to help if I could.  From now on the watchword is, ’hands off the Hands!’”

This was a promise, and he kept it scrupulously.  But the steady fire in his heart was scattered as a flaming log is broken into many embers by the clumsy stab of a poker.  He had no longer a settled aim in life.  He saw no niche which he could fill, and felt that the world had no particular use for the second Peter Rolls.  The one thing he had longed for as a boy, which did not now in his young manhood appear stale and unprofitable, was a journey round the world and a glimpse of the East.  When his father said uneasily:  “Why don’t you travel, my boy?” Peter answered that perhaps it would be a good thing.