Judge Cahill looked inexpressively relieved. He poured out a little wine and drank it off quickly, as if he had experienced some moment of sharp emotion which had left him faint. The younger man noticed the action and went on hastily.
“It was nothing—only about a girl whom you never heard of, and myself—something that happens to two-thirds of the men one meets—it is really of little consequence, though it has worried me, and since I have spoken of it at all, I may as well tell you about it, sir.”
But it was a very fragmentary story that he told and the facts, as he reviewed them hastily, seemed absurdly commonplace and inadequate to the amount of worry he had given himself.
“It was five years ago, sir, you remember, just after I left college, and went out to Nevada for the summer with Lord Deveridge and the rest of that English syndicate. It was when they bought ‘The Bish’ mine, you know. Of course we went about a great deal. They were so afraid of being swindled, and there had been such pots of money lost out there by English syndicates, that they determined to investigate fully and take every precaution. So they went around trying to sift things out, and there were a great many complications of all sorts which occasioned a great deal of delay, and there were so many conflicting rumors about the value of the mine, that I began to think they were never going to wind up things. Deveridge and I got awfully tired of pottering around after all sorts of men, meeting an expert geologist here and a committee there, and never getting at anything; so we finally decided to cut the whole thing for two weeks and go off on a little shooting expedition. Two or three others joined us, and we had magnificent sport for four days—and then I sprained my bad ankle again.” He stopped suddenly. “It is very curious how things happen,” he said at length, with a little laugh. “If it hadn’t rained the morning of the Springfield game, the ground wouldn’t have been wet and I wouldn’t have slipped in that last scrimmage, and my ankle wouldn’t have been sprained, and I wouldn’t have wrenched it on that mountain road, and I wouldn’t have been laid up two weeks in the house with her, and none of this would have happened.”
But the elder man was in no mood for trifling.
“You were saying——?” he began, anxiously.
“That I hurt my ankle and had to limp to the nearest inhabited place and stay there until it got better. Of course the others went on. They were coming back that way and stopped for me. I was all broken up at not being able to enjoy the shooting, but my ankle gave me so much trouble at first that I didn’t have a great deal of time to think about it; and then it began to dawn on me that she—the daughter I mean—was unusually pretty and refined and quite different from her parents seemingly, and—and—there was nothing else to do, sir, and I am afraid that I acted as most young men would act under similar circumstances.”
“You mean,” said his father, with an uncompromising directness which Cahill thought rather brutal and unnecessary, “you mean that you made love to the girl?”
The young man nodded.
“She was very pretty, you know, and it was only for a short time, and she must have seen—have realized—that there was a difference, that there was nothing to it. It was only the most incipient flirtation—the same thing that goes on at Bar Harbor and the Pier and Newport among a different class of people.”