Fidelia did not know what to reply to this man; she did not know how to treat a man who disapproved of her, upon whom she made no favorable effect at all. She said, nervously: "We haven't come for a visit."
"She means, father," David put in quickly, "we've come down just for the day. I've got to go back to-morrow night."
His father turned to him. "Why must you go back?"
"For business, father."
"Your automobile business, that is."
"That's my business, father."
"Yes," his father said, as though he had had to recollect. "Of course that's your business."
Then David saw that his father was shaking. His father said: "Come to my room after a minute, David."
His father faced Fidelia again. "This is now your home," he announced to her. "You will always be welcome here; always," he repeated.
When his father left the room, David went to his wife and kissed her; then, quivering himself, he sought his father in the church.
His father's room—the chamber his father meant when he said "my room"—was a small, square apartment under the church steeple which a man less given to the plainest in speech and thought would have called his "study." It contained the books which his father had had at the Seminary, the later-bought volumes of sermons, The Life of Christ, four brown backs of Josephus and the dictionary of the Bible in three severe, regular rows upon home carpentered pine
