“You’d like me to stay here and suffer. Yes, I know that.” Her hand dropped from his sleeve. “But I shan’t stay here,” he went on unmoved, “and pretty soon I shan’t suffer—so much.”
From that old, recurrent touch of hardness in his voice and air, she once again recoiled. “Well, I’ve said all I mean to say. You must please yourself.”
“Pleasure is of course what one expects in the Klondike.”
They walked in absolute silence back to the porch. Hildegarde went in at once, saying “good-night” over her shoulder, and quite sure that as usual he would follow her. But he stayed behind for fully twenty minutes, talking with Mr. Mar, who was smoking out there in the dusk. Hildegarde turned up the electric light in the parlor, and moved about the room, picking up and putting down one book after another. How many of them he had given her—that provoking person who stayed so long talking to her father! By and by she heard her own name called. Was that her father? How curious his voice sounded!
“Yes,” she answered, but made no great haste. When at last she reached her father’s side, she couldn’t see where Cheviot was. She looked round in the dim light, and a little sharply, “Has he gone?” she said. As the words fell on the quiet air, she heard the gate shut. The sound jarred. It gave her a sensation as of a being abandoned. The house was very quiet to-night.
“Gone? Yes. Where’s your mother, Hildegarde?” Mar asked with unheard-of briskness.
“She’s over at the Coxes’.”
“Ah!” A moment’s pause, and then, “To think of Cheviot! Cheviot of all men! Weren’t you surprised?”
“You aren’t talking about the Klondike?”
“What else should I be talking of?” he demanded unreasonably, for after all there were other topics.