ld of the commonplace
conventions, with New York as its starting point and homing place; and
she thought she knew something of humankind. But it came to her suddenly
that the men she knew best were not at all like these two.

"Shall we go back now?" she asked; and they were half-way down to the
siding and the private car before she spoke again. It took some little
time to compass sufficient humility to make amends, and even then the
admission came to no more than four words.

"I'm sorry, Mr. Ford."

"What for?" he asked, knowing only that he was coming to love her more
blindly with every added minute of their companionship.

"For--for trying to be hateful." It was a humbler thing than any she had
ever said to a man, but the raw sincerity of time and place and
association was beginning to get into her blood.

"If it comes to that, there were two of us," he rejoined, matching her
frankness. "And, as you remarked a while back, I was certainly the
aggressor. Shall we call it a truce for the present?"

"If you will be generous enough."

"Oh, I am generosity itself, under ordinary conditions; but just now
I'll admit that I am fearfully and wonderfully inhospitable. I can't
help wishing most fervently that something had happened to prevent your
uncle's coming."

"Is it uncle who is in the way?--or the pleasure party?"

"Both."

"We are negligible," she said, meaning the pleasurers.

"No, you are not; and neither is your Uncle Sidney."

"Is he still formidable to you?" she laughed.

"He is, indeed. But, worse than that, he is likely to prove a very
considerable disturbing element if I can't keep him from plunging in
upon us."

She let half of the remaining distance to the end of the steep grade go
underfoot before she said: "I like to help people, sometimes; but I
don't like to do it in the dark."

He would have explained instantly to a man for the sake of gaining an
ally. But he could not bring himself to the point of telling her the
story of graft and misrule in which the MacMorroghs were the principals,
and North--and her uncle, by implication--the backers.

So he said: "It is rather a long story, and you would scarcely
understand it. We have been having constant trouble with the
MacMorroghs, the contractors, and there is a bad state of affairs in the
grading camps. It has come to a point where I shall have to fight the
MacMorroghs to some sort of a finish, and--well, to put it very baldly,
I don't want