Another sentence which she did not need to finish!

For a while Petro’s whole soul was so steeped in the joy of mother’s sympathy, and in plans for the future, that he forgot the faint uneasiness which had stirred within him at father’s message about the milk.  Something had seemed to whisper:  “It’s only an excuse.”  And his asking not to be disturbed all the afternoon, “can it mean that he’s got a special reason for wanting to be let alone hour after hour?”

But Petro and mother had been deep in conversation before the whisper came.  In the very midst of it she had asked a beautifully understanding question about Win, and in answering Petro forgot everything else for a time.

They talked intimately in the big, unfriendly, imitation Elizabethan dining-room which for once they had to themselves And then they continued their talk still more intimately in the “den.”  It was only the grandfather clock striking four that reminded Petro of his uneasiness and of the whisper.

Why it did remind him he could hardly have explained, except that the clock had a very curious individuality for him.  It had belonged to his great grandmother and had come down through her to his mother.  Even as a little boy he had felt that it was more than a clock:  it was an old friend who had ticked through the years, keeping time with the heart-beats of those for whom it told the passing moments of life and death.  Often he had imagined that with its ticking it gave good advice, if only one could understand.  Now, when it struck four, it seemed to Petro that it did so in a dry, peremptory manner intended to be arresting, to remind him of something important that he was in danger of forgetting.

This pause in his thoughts left room for the whisper to come again.  It came, adding to its first suggestion:  “Don’t you know that while you and mother were lingering so happily over your lunch, father stole away and went off to make mischief between you and the girl?”

Petro sprang up.  He was ashamed to harbour such a thought of treachery, but it was there.  He could easily learn whether father had gone to New York by inquiring if one of the motors had been taken out.  But it was hardly worth while to ask questions.  Peter knew that his father had gone, and why.

CHAPTER XXVII

THE BATTLE

All the morning Win was in a state of strange, almost hysterical, exaltation.  Again and again she warned her spirit down from the heights, but it would not hear, and stood there in the sunshine singing a wild song of love and joy.

Wonderful, incredible pictures painted themselves before her eyes.  She saw Peter, impressed with her words—­as indeed he had seemed to be—­and remembering them nobly for the benefit of the two thousand hands within the Hands.  She saw herself as his wife (oh, bold, forbidden thought, which dared her to push it from her heart!) helping him reach the ideal standard of what a great department store should be, planning new and highly improved systems of insurance, thinking out ways for employees to share profits, and of giving them pensions.