"These coming minutes while you are here with me."
"Really," she flashed him a rather bewildering look, "I did think for once you were going to be serious!"
"I am serious," he dug the heel of his boot thoughtfully into the tanbark. "I wish I weren't—or didn't have to be."
"Has something gone wrong—with the road?" There was a slight tinge of irony in the suggestion.
"No, but something's gone wrong with the world. I wish," he suddenly looked up at her, "that I could be as sure of laying a smooth grade for—for my friends as I am for trains of coal!"
"Your friends might have to wait a long time before traveling about," she laughed, but there was a note of apprehension in her voice which again put him on his guard;—and yet he could not help feeling that a partial preparation was only fair to her.
"It wouldn't be a bad thing if some people never traveled about," he smiled. "I might then succeed in keeping you here, and those hot-headed mountaineers would stay back in their holes and rot forever, as they ought."
"Oh, Brent," she exclaimed, in a hurt voice, "there is such a wealth of splendid human material up there if we can only get hold of it! They're all ambitious—if stirred!"
He waited, asking: "And what else?"
"Nothing else."