never dished me and he feels I didn't dish him. We never talked business; we never thought business, either, but . . . well, Lyman and I . . ." Jay groped vainly for a word.
"You built your Baptist church together," Ellen offered, surprisingly.
"What?"
Ellen looked up at him, flushing. "Your grandfather and old Mr. Alban built a Baptist church together fifty years ago, and so he's stuck with you ever since," she quietly said. "Lyman Howarth and you started something of the same sort inside you. I thought so, when I heard you talking to him on the phone."
"We started something," Jay said, "and nothing could turn it sourer than for me to ask him for business." He winced at the idea. "Can you imagine it? Even on the business side, it would be the one worst move; but wait and say nothing, and Lyman will work the account around to me."
He struck his fist in the palm of his hand. "But we have to have time—time—and hold Alban, somehow. Lyman can't go to his father and say 'give our business to a failing concern.' We have to be going, and going strong to get Howarth; and never let them guess how we need them."
He flung himself back and lay looking up at the trees; and Ellen longed to move nearer him.
"It's come up to me, hasn't it?" he asked; and she knew exactly what he meant, as she followed his thought to his father in the home of his father's dead friend.
She thought, as Jay was thinking, of his father having
