For the remainder of the brief summer he spent every spare moment with the girl,—mornings on the courts, long afternoon walks, whispering evenings in the rock seat. He would come home after a day with her, and lie, tumbling sleeplessly on his bed, living over the delicious last moments spent with her, and elaborating intenser fantasies of love-making. Her eyes obsessed him; they were like his mother's.
Another friendship marked the summer. Old Nathaniel Guild did not come to the place as often as before; the winter had been hard on him, and the steep paths were often too much for his frail strength. As Paul was kept close to his desk, it was the son who accompanied Guild on his infrequent rambles over the grounds, and the rougher land beyond the fence.
"You notice the tilt of these outcrop rocks, Pelham?" he asked, one afternoon. "They slant forty degrees on this hill, and forty-four beyond Logan Avenue, on the other hill. Last week I was over beyond West Adamsville; all of these strata are there; only they angle to the west, instead of to the east, as here. Like this."
He diagrammed roughly on a sheet in his note book.
"Here are the two Ida veins,—the big veins here; here is the soft hematite under them, and a thin harder vein. Then comes bedrock, and under it a heavy clay deposit. Above the Ida vein there was quartz,—the same quartz we take from the back of the place. Now, on the west part of town,"—he indicated with sweep of his hand the hazy distance beyond the furnaced city,—"there the same strata were once. But the erosion has gone further. There is only a trace of the quartz, and the three top veins. Only a few thin streaks of the bottom hard ore are there. Even the bedrock has been washed off some of the hills...."
Pelham nodded.
"If we could have gotten hold of that iron too!... All gone, all washed away."
"How does it happen that the strata are the same?"
Nathaniel looked at him sharply from under bushy gray eyebrows. He turned again to the paper, and continued the two lines until they met, high above what was now Adamsville.
"Wait.... This point is the sand hills,—there to the east. There are more of them beyond the West Highlands range. See,——" and a firm stroke of the pencil continued their lines until they arched above the former peak.