'I want to have a talk with you.' The mother cast a rather suspicious glance.

There was an impressiveness in the young man's look and tone which disposed her to obey without remark.
'How long is it,' Richard asked, when attention waited upon him, 'since you heard anything of father's uncle, my namesake ?' Mrs.Mutimer's face exhibited the dawning of intelligence, an unwrinkling here and there, a slight rounding of the lips.
'Why, what of him ?' she asked in an undertone, leaving a needle unthreaded.
'The old man's just dead.' Agitation seized the listener, agitation of a kind most unusual in her.
Her hands trembled, her eyes grew wide.
'You haven't heard anything of him lately ?' pursued Richard.
'Heard?
Not I.No more did your father ever since two years afore we was married.

I'd always thought he was dead long ago.

What of him, Dick ?' 'From what I'm told I thought you'd perhaps been keeping things to yourself.

'Twouldn't have been unlike you, mother.