"Had to sew a button on my coat," he explained. "Then I found I'd sewed in one of my fingers and had to start all over again."
Lily was conscious of a change in him. He looked older, she thought, and thinner. His smile, when it came, was as boyish as ever, but he did not smile so much, and seen in full daylight he was shabby. He seemed totally unconscious of his clothes, however.
"What do you do with yourself, Willy?" she asked. "I mean when you are free?"
"Read and study. I want to take up metallurgy pretty soon. There's a night course at the college."
"We use metallurgists in the mill. When you are ready I know father would be glad to have you."
He flushed at that.
"Thanks," he said. "I'd rather get in, wherever I go, by what I know, and not who I know."
She felt considerably snubbed, but she knew his curious pride. After a time, while he threw a stick into the park lake and Jinx retrieved it, he said: "What do you do with yourself these days, Lily?"
"Nothing. I've forgotten how to work, I'm afraid. And I'm not very happy, Willy. I ought to be, but I'm just--not."
"You've learned what it is to be useful," he observed gravely, "and now it hardly seems worth while just to live, and nothing else. Is that it?"
"I suppose."
"Isn't there anything you can do?"
"They won't let me work, and I hate to study."
There was a silence. Willy Cameron sat on the bench, bent and staring ahead. Jinx brought the stick, and, receiving no attention, insinuated a dripping body between his knees. He patted the dog's head absently.
"I have been thinking about the night I went to dinner at your house," he said at last. "I had no business to say what I said then. I've got a miserable habit of saying just what comes into my mind, and I've been afraid, ever since, that it would end in your not wanting to see me again. Just try to forget it happened, won't you?"
"I knew it was an impulse, but it made me very proud, Willy."
"All right," he said quietly. "And that's that. Now about your grandfather. I've had him on my mind, too. He is an old man, and sometimes they are peculiar. I am only sorry I upset him. And you are to forget that, too."