He meandered to a full stop.  His mouth hung open, and his mind was a hopeless blank.

Bibbs looked up patiently—­an old, old look.  “Yes, father; I’m listening.”

“That’s all,” said Sheridan, frowning heavily.  “That’s all I came to say, and you better see’t you remember it!”

He shook his head warningly, and went out, closing the door behind him with a crash.  However, no sound of footsteps indicated his departure.  He stopped just outside the door, and stood there a minute or more.  Then abruptly he turned the knob and exhibited to his son a forehead liberally covered with perspiration.

“Look here,” he said, crossly.  “That girl over yonder wrote Jim a letter—­”

“I know,” said Bibbs.  “She told me.”

“Well, I thought you needn’t feel so much upset about it—­” The door closed on his voice as he withdrew, but the conclusion of the sentence was nevertheless audible—­“if you knew she wouldn’t have Jim, either.”

And he stamped his way down-stairs to tell his wife to quit her frettin’ and not bother him with any more fool’s errands.  She was about to inquire what Bibbs “said,” but after a second thought she decided not to speak at all.  She merely murmured a wordless assent, and verbal communication was given over between them for the rest of that afternoon.

Bibbs and his father were gone when Mrs. Sheridan woke, the next morning, and she had a dreary day.  She missed Edith woefully, and she worried about what might be taking place in the Sheridan Building.  She felt that everything depended on how Bibbs “took hold,” and upon her husband’s return in the evening she seized upon the first opportunity to ask him how things had gone.  He was non-committal.  What could anybody tell by the first day?  He’d seen plenty go at things well enough right at the start and then blow up.  Pretty near anybody could show up fair the first day or so.  There was a big job ahead.  This material, such as it was—­Bibbs, in fact—­had to be broken in to handling the work Roscoe had done; and then, at least as an overseer, he must take Jim’s position in the Realty Company as well.  He told her to ask him again in a month.

But during the course of dinner she gathered from some disjointed remarks of his that he and Bibbs had lunched together at the small restaurant where it had been Sheridan’s custom to lunch with Jim, and she took this to be an encouraging sign.  Bibbs went to his room as soon as they left the table, and her husband was not communicative after reading his paper.

She became an anxious spectator of Bibbs’s progress as a man of business, although it was a progress she could glimpse but dimly and only in the evening, through his remarks and his father’s at dinner.  Usually Bibbs was silent, except when directly addressed, but on the first evening of the third week of his new career he offered an opinion which had apparently been the subject of previous argument.