ly."

"Do you really think so small of a man's work in the world, Miss Adair?"
he demanded, not very coherently. "I'm not saying that the scenery
doesn't move me. It does; and the first time I stood here on this
summit, I presume I felt just as you do now. But my comings and goings
have been chiefly concerned with this"--kicking the rail of the new
track which threaded the shallow valley of the pass. "I am trying to
build a railroad; to build it quickly, and as well as I can. When I get
it finished, I may have time to admire the scenery."

It was a little appeal for sympathy, apparent enough in spite of its
indirectness; but Miss Adair was still mindful of Ford's too evident
willingness to leave her behind at the deserted grading-camp half-way
down to Saint's Rest where the Nadia was temporarily side-tracked.

"Another ideal gone," she lamented, in mock despair. "All those
trampings and toilings up this magnificent mountain merely to prepare
for the laying of some logs of wood in a row, with two strands of iron
to fasten them together!"

He smiled at her definition of his railroad, and the keen edge of his
annoyance was a little blunted. He had been telling himself that she
might be twenty-four, or possibly twenty-five; but evidently she was
only a child, with a child's appreciation of a very considerable
industrial triumph. Old engineers, one of them an assistant on his own
staff, had shaken their heads and declared that the running of a
standard gauge railroad over Plug Pass was a sheer impossibility. Yet he
had done it.

"I suspect I owe you an apology," he said, yielding a little to the love
which was fighting with discouragement and righteous anger for the first
place in his heart. "I'm afraid I have been taking you too seriously,
all along."

Her laugh was a delicious little ripple of exultation. She had succeeded
in avenging herself.

"I can forgive you now," she said, and the blue eyes were dancing. "But
you must admit that you were the aggressor. I have _never_ been made so
pointedly unwelcome in all my life. I believe you were going to refuse
to let me walk up here with you if Uncle Sidney had not commanded you
to."

This time his smile was a grin, but it was not ill-natured.

"I should, indeed," he confessed quite frankly. "To be brutally candid,
I had a decided attack of the 'unwelcomes' when I received Mr.
Colbrith's wire announcing his intention of bringing his picnic party
out here into the mi