There was no defect in the chimney's constitution. It drew admirably, and with the white and red flames dancing in the fireplace, two or three chairs, more or less disabled, a table, and an upholstered lounge gathered at random from the rooms near at hand, the possibility of sojourning comfortably for a few days in the deserted hostelry seemed amply assured.
Once more Dundas gazed fixedly at the face of the young mountaineer, who still bent on one knee on the hearth, watching with smiling eyes the triumphs of his fire-making. It seemed to him afterwards that his judgment was strangely at fault; he perceived naught of import in the shallow brightness of the young man's eyes, like the polished surface of jet; in the instability of his jealousy, his anger; in his hap-hazard, mercurial temperament. Once he might have noted how flat were the spaces beneath the eyes, how few were the lines that defined the lid, the socket, the curve of the cheekbone, the bridge of the nose, and how expressionless. It was doubtless the warmth and glow of the fire, the clinging desire of companionship, the earnest determination to be content, pathetic in one who had but little reason for optimism, that caused him to ignore the vacillating glancing moods that successively swayed Keenan, strong while they lasted, but with scanty augury because of their evanescence. He was like some newly discovered property in physics of untried potentialities, of which nothing is ascertained but its uncertainties.
And yet he seemed to Dundas a simple country fellow, good-natured in the main, unsuspicious, and helpful. So, giving a long sigh of relief and fatigue, Dundas sank down in one of the large arm-chairs that had once done duty for the summer loungers on the piazza.
In the light of the fire Emory was once more looking at him. A certain air of distinction, a grace and ease of movement, an indescribable quality of bearing which he could not discriminate, yet which he instinctively recognized as superior, offended him in some sort. He noticed again the ring on the stranger's hand as he drew off his glove. Gloves! Emory Keen an would as soon have thought of wearing a petticoat. Once more the fear that these effeminate graces found favor in Millicent's estimation smote upon his heart. It made the surface of his opaque eyes glisten as Dundas rose and took up a pipe and tobacco-pouch which he had laid on the mantelpiece, his full height and fine figure shown in the changed posture.
“Ez tall ez me, ef not taller, an', by gum! a good thirty pound heavier,” Emory reflected, with, a growing dismay that he had not those stalwart claims to precedence in height and weight as an offset to the smoother fascinations of the stranger's polish.
He had risen hastily to his feet. He would not linger to smoke fraternally over the fire, and thus cement friendly relations.
“I guided him hyar, like old Sim Roxby axed me ter do, an' that's all. I ain't keerin' ef I never lay eyes on him again,” he said to himself.
“Going?” said Dundas, pleasantly, noticing the motion. “You'll look in again, won't you?”
“Wunst in a while, I reckon,” drawled Keenan, a trifle thrown off his balance by this courtesy.
He paused at the door, looking back over his shoulder for a moment at the illumined room, then stepped out into the night, leaving the tenant of the lonely old house filling his pipe by the fire.