“All well at home?” asked the young fellow, as he took up the bill of fare to order the dinner.  His father hated that, and always made him do it.

“Yes, yes; as usual, I believe.  Minnie is off for a week at the mountains; Eunice is at home.”

“Oh!  How would you like some green goose, with apple-sauce, sweet-potatoes, and succotash?”

“It seems to me that was pretty good, the last time.  All right, if you like it.”

“I don’t know that I care for anything much.  I’m a little off my feed.  No soup,” he said, looking up at the waiter bending over him; and then he gave the order.  “I think you may bring me half a dozen Blue Points, if they’re good,” he called after him.

“Didn’t Bar Harbour agree with you—­or Campobello?” asked Mr. Mavering, taking the opening offered him.

“No, not very well,” said Dan; and he said no more about it, leaving his father to make his own inferences as to the kind or degree of the disagreement.

“Well, have you made up your mind?” asked the father, resting his elbows on either side of his plate, and putting his hands together softly, while he looked across them with a cheery kindness at his boy.

“Yes, I have,” said Dan slowly.

“Well?”

“I don’t believe I care to go into the law.”

“Sure?”

“Yes.”

“Well, that’s all right, then.  I wished you to choose freely, and I suppose you’ve done so.”

“Oh Yes.”

“I think you’ve chosen wisely, and I’m very glad.  It’s a weight off my mind.  I think you’ll be happier in the business than you would in the law; I think you’ll enjoy it.  You needn’t look forward to a great deal of Ponkwasset Falls, unless you like.”

“I shouldn’t mind going there,” said Dan listlessly.

“It won’t be necessary—­at first.  In fact, it won’t be desirable.  I want you to look up the business at this end a little.”

Dan gave a start.  “In Boston?”

“Yes.  It isn’t in the shape I want to have it.  I propose to open a place of our own, and to put you in charge.”  Something in the young man’s face expressed reluctance, and his father asked kindly, “Would that be distasteful to you?”

“Oh no.  It isn’t the thing I object to, but I don’t know that I care to be in Boston.”  He lifted his face and looked his father full in the eyes, but with a gaze that refused to convey anything definite.  Then the father knew that the boy’s love affair had gone seriously wrong.

The waiter came with the dinner, and made an interruption in which they could be naturally silent.  When he had put the dinner before them, and cumbered them with superfluous service, after the fashion of his kind, he withdrew a little way, and left them to resume their talk.

“Well,” said the elder lightly, as if Dan’s not caring to be in Boston had no particular significance for him, “I don’t know that I care to have you settle down to it immediately.  I rather think I’d like to have you look about first a little.  Go to New York, go to Philadelphia, and see their processes there.  We can’t afford to get old-fashioned in our ways.  I’ve always been more interested by the aesthetic side of the business, but you ought to have a taste for the mechanism, from your grandfather; your mother has it.”