For two years Jock McChesney had watched the field as it swept by in its patient, devious, cruel game of Hunt the Contract.  But he had never been in at the death.  Those two years had taught him how to ride; to take a fence; to leap a ditch.  He had had his awkward bumps, and his clumsy falls.  He had lost his way more than once.  But he had always groped his way back again, stumblingly, through the dusk.  Jock McChesney was the youngest man on the Berg, Shriner Advertising Company’s big staff of surprisingly young men.  So young that the casual glance did not reveal to you the marks that the strain of those two years had left on his boyish face.  But the marks were there.

Nature etches with the most delicate of points.  She knows the cunning secret of light and shadow.  You scarcely realize that she has been at work.  A faint line about the mouth, a fairy tracing at the corners of the eyes, a mere vague touch just at the nostrils—­and the thing is done.

Even Emma McChesney’s eyes—­those mother-eyes which make the lynx seem a mole—­had failed to note the subtle change.  Then, suddenly, one night, the lines leaped out at her.

They were seated at opposite sides of the book-littered library table in the living-room of the cheerful up-town apartment which was the realization of the nightly dream which Mrs. Emma McChesney had had in her ten years on the road for the T.A.  Buck Featherloom Petticoat Company.  Jock McChesney’s side of the big table was completely covered with the mass of copy-paper, rough sketches, photographs and drawings which make up an advertising lay-out.  He was bent over the work, absorbed, intent, his forearms resting on the table.  Emma McChesney glanced up from her magazine just as Jock bent forward to reach a scrap of paper that had fluttered away.  The lamplight fell full on his face.  And Emma McChesney saw.  The hand that held the magazine fell to her lap.  Her lips were parted slightly.  She sat very quietly, her eyes never leaving the face that frowned so intently over the littered table.  The room had been very quiet before—­Jock busy with his work, his mother interested in her magazine.  But this silence was different.  There was something electric in it.  It was a silence that beats on the brain like a noise.  Jock McChesney, bent over his work, heard it, felt it, and, oppressed by it, looked up suddenly.  He met those two eyes opposite.

“Spooks?  Or is it my godlike beauty which holds you thus?  Or is my face dirty?”

Emma McChesney did not smile.  She laid her magazine on the table, face down, and leaned forward, her staring eyes still fixed on her son’s face.

“Look here, young ’un.  Are you working too hard?”

“Me?  Now?  This stuff you mean—?”

“No; I mean in the last year.  Are they piling it up on you?”

Jock laughed a laugh that was nothing less than a failure, so little of real mirth did it contain.