Page:Left to Themselves (1891).djvu/223

 your father advise. How lucky you didn't put that daguerreotype of your mother in!—the one that is to be copied."

"Yes," answered the boy, seriously; "it was lucky. Papa would have felt as badly as I if that had been lost. It's the only one we like."

Touchtone could see that this prolonged separation of the boy from his father, in more than one sense, would bring them nearer to each other than they ever had been before. "And a precious good thing," he soliloquized. "The best way to keep some fellows chums seems to have somebody give them both a sound shaking now and then. Perhaps this sort of thing for Gerald and Mr. Saxton amounts to that." In spite of the resolute silence of Gerald, for the sake of his friend, on the great topic of his father's or Mr. Marcy's whereabouts and conclusions, Philip (who certainly did not try to introduce it) knew that most of the time Mr. Saxton was in Gerald's mind.

"Do you know what I think?" he said abruptly, once, looking up from the backgammon-board, after having thrown his dice and placed his men abstractedly during several turns. "I don't believe that I've appreciated papa very