my life in my own way." He took up the frying-pan and the coffee-pot and carried them into the kitchen. "Leave me alone; that's all. I can take care of myself."
He began to clear off the table, filling the kettle and making the dishes ready in the wash-pan. He was trembling with a resentful determination, tall, fragile, pitiful in this ludicrous occupation of scullion.
When he went into the kitchen, his father wiped his forehead, his eyes wandering over the poor discomforts of the room—which he had thought to find Don eager to leave—baffled, but still resolved to take the son home to the mother and save him from this folly. He had tried sarcasm, gentleness, abuse and anger; he had played all the tricks which his trade uses to draw the truth from the witness in the box; and as yet he did not even understand what it was that his son was concealing from him, what had brought the boy here, what kept him here, what he hoped to find here that he could not find at home.
He lighted a cigar which he had accepted from his brother-in-law on their railroad journey together; and he smoked it as if he did not know that it was in his mouth—his eyes darting from point to point of the evidence which he had gathered from Mr. McLean, from Pittsey and from Don himself—his eyebrows working—sometimes shaking his head, and more than once closing his hands on a parental impulse to thrash the young fool into submission and take him home by the ear.
Don washed and dried the dishes, emptied the water into the sink, scoured the pan, hung up the dish-rag,
