“I will ask the questions,” Achilles had said, in his quiet voice, and it had been arranged that he should come to Idlewood when the surgeon gave the word.  
He arrived the next night, stepping from the car as it drew up before the door, and Alcibiades, standing¹ among the flowers talking with Miss Stone, saw him and started and came forward swiftly. He had not known that his father was coming—he ran a little as he came nearer and threw himself in his arms, laughing out.
 
Achilles smiled—a dark, wistful smile. “You are grown strong,” he said. He held him off to look at him.
 
The boy’s teeth gleamed—a white line. “To-morrow we go home?” he replied. “I am all well—father—well now!”
 
But Achilles shook his head. “To-morrow we stay,” he replied. “I stay one day—two days—three—” He looked at the boy narrowly. “Then we go home.”
 
The boy smiled contentedly² and they moved away. Early the next morning he was up before Achilles, calling to him from the garden to hurry and see the flowers before the mist was off them, and showing him, with eager teeth, his own radishes—ready to pull—and little lines of green lettuce³ that sprang above the earth. “I plant,” said the boy proudly. “I make grow.” He swung his arm over the whole garden.
 
Achilles watched him with gentle face, following him from bed to bed and stooping to the plants with courteous⁴ gesture. It was all like home. They had never been in a garden before—in this new land... the melons and berries and plums and peaches and pears that came crated⁵ into the little fruit-shop had grown in unknown fields—but here they stretched in the sun; and the two Greeks moved toward them with laughing, gentle words and quick gestures that flitted and stopped, and went on, and gathered in the day. The new world was gathering⁶ its sky about them; and their faces turned to meet it. And with every gesture of the boy, Achilles’s eyes were on him, studying his face, its quick colour running beneath the tan, and the clear light of his eyes. Indoors or out, he was testing him; and with every gesture his heart sang. His boy was well... and he held a key that should open the dark door that baffled them all. When he spoke⁷, that door would open for them—a little way, perhaps—only a little way—but the rest would be clear. And soon the boy would speak.
 
In the house Philip Harris waited; and with him the chief of police, detectives and plain-clothes men—summoned hastily—waited what should develop. They watched the boy and his father, from a distance, and speculated and made guesses on what he would know; for weeks they had been waiting on a sick boy’s whim—held back by the doctor’s orders. They watched him moving across the garden—his quick, supple⁸ gestures, his live face—the boy was well enough! They smoked innumerable cigars and strolled out through the grounds and sat by the river, and threw stones into its sluggish⁹ current, waiting while hours went by. Since the ultimatum—a hundred thousand for three months—not a line had reached them, no message over the whispering wires—the child mig............