"Oh, but that's easily explained. Summers, when she timed her visits to Alaska, I was busy getting my party into the field. The working season up there is short."
"But winters, at Seattle and in Washington even, it has been the same."
"Winters, why, winters, I have my geological reports to get in shape for the printer; interminable proofs to go over; and there are so many necessary people to meet in connection with my work. Then, too, if the season has been spent in opening country of special interest, I like to prepare a paper for the geographical society; that keeps me in touch with old friends."
"Old friends," she repeated after a moment. "Do you know it was one of them, or rather one of your closest friends, who encouraged my delusion in regard to you?"
"No, how was it?"
"Why, he said you were the hardest man in the world to turn, a man of iron when once you made up your mind, but that Mrs. Feversham was right; you were shy. He had known you to go miles around, on occasion, to avoid a town, just to escape meeting a woman. And he told us—of course I can repeat it since it is so ridiculously untrue—that it was easier to bridle a trapped moose than to lead you to a ballroom; but that once there, no doubt you would gentle fine."
She leaned back in her seat, laughing softly, though it was obviously a joke at her own expense as well as Tisdale's. "And I believed it," she added. "I believed it—every word."
Tisdale laughed too, a deep undernote. "That sounds like Billy Foster. I wager it was Foster. Was it?" he asked.
She nodded affirmatively.
"Then Foster has met you." Tisdale's voice rang a little. "He knows you, after all."