His father called up to Pat, “I think you’d better take the horses in now.”

“Yes, sir:  I’ve got the box-stalls ready for ’em.”

Dan remembered how he and Eunice used to get into the box-stall with his pony, and play at circus with it; he stood up on the pony, and his sister was the ring-master.  The picture of his careless childhood reflected a deeper pathos upon his troubled present, and he sighed again.

His father said, as they moved on through the barn:  “Some of the best people I’ve ever known were what were called worldly people.  They are apt to be sincere, and they have none of the spiritual pride, the conceit of self-righteousness, which often comes to people who are shut up by conscience or circumstance to the study of their own motives and actions.”

“I don’t think she was one of that kind,” said Dan.

“Oh, I don’t know that she was.  But the chances of happiness, of goodness, would be greater with a less self-centred person—­for you.”

“Ah, Yes!  For me!” said Dan bitterly.  “Because I hadn’t it in me to be frank with her.  With a man like me, a woman had better be a little scampish, too!  Father, I could get over the loss; she might have died, and I could have got over that; but I can’t get over being to blame.”

“I don’t think I’d indulge in any remorse,” said his father.  “There’s nothing so useless, so depraving, as that.  If you see you’re wrong, it’s for your warning, not for your destruction.”

Dan was not really feeling very remorseful; he had never felt that he was much to blame; but he had an intellectual perception of the case, and he thought that he ought to feel remorseful; it was this persuasion that he took for an emotion.  He continued to look very disconsolate.

“Come,” said his father, touching his arm, “I don’t want you to brood upon these things.  It can do no manner of good.  I want you to go to New York next week and look after that Lafflin process.  If it’s what he thinks—­if he can really cast his brass patterns without air-holes—­it will revolutionise our business.  I want to get hold of him.”

The Portuguese cook was standing in the basement door which they passed at the back of the house.  He saluted father and son with a glittering smile.

“Hello, Joe!” said Dan.

“Ah, Joe!” said his father; he touched his hat to the cook, who snatched his cap off.

“What a brick you are, father!” thought Dan.  His heart leaped at the notion of getting away from Ponkwasset; he perceived how it had been irking him to stay.  “If you think I could manage it with Lafflin—­”

“Oh, I think you could.  He’s another slippery chap.”

Dan laughed for pleasure and pain at his father’s joke.

XLIX.

In New York Dan found that Lafflin had gone to Washington to look up something in connection with his patent.  In his eagerness to get away from home, Dan had supposed that his father meant to make a holiday for him, and he learned with a little surprise that he was quite in earnest about getting hold of the invention he wrote home of Lafflin’s absence; and he got a telegram in reply ordering him to follow on to Washington.