AT the departure of the two fishermen, Virginia Grillage had taken Lucille Vallory under her wing, closing the cottage under the pines and taking the blind girl to the hotel. This left Oswald more or less unattached. Since there was no welcome for him at the foot of the ridge, and David had not even taken the trouble to introduce him to the members of the engineering staff, he spent the greater part of his time at the Inn, devoting himself, so far as Miss Grillage would permit it, to the care and comfort of the helpless one, and taking his meals in due submission at a table with Miss Virginia and her charge, the Englishman, and the heir of profitable breakfast-foods.
Beneath these routine time-killings, days in which nothing transpired to break the monotonous round of eating and sleeping and lounging upon the shaded porches of the Inn, Oswald fancied he could feel the tension of an approaching crisis. To a keen-eyed young lawyer whose profession led logically to a study of the human problem in all its phases, the premonitory signs emphasized themselves. Miss Virginia, apparently engrossed in her favorite pastime of playing off one man against another, struck a false note now and then; young Wishart was occasionally jogged out of his customary rut of good-natured indolence; and even the imperturbable Englishman was losing the fine edge of a carefully cultivated Old-World indifference to his surroundings.
Notwithstanding these indications, it was Lucille Vallory who first put the impending threat into words, confiding in Oswald one evening when Virginia Grillage had gone for a stroll along the ridge accompanied by her two shadows.
“What is it, Herbert?” the blind girl asked; “what is happening to us all?”
“What should be happening?” he evaded. “Aren’t you enjoying yourself?”
“You know what I mean,” she insisted. “Nothing is the same any more; I can feel it. You are troubled about something, and so is Virginia. No, it isn’t anything that either of you say; it’s just how you feel inside. And Davie; he is different, too—so cruelly different. Is it because he is worried about his work?”
Oswald said what there was to be said, doing violence to his own convictions in an effort to shield the loved one. There was nothing for anybody to be troubled about, he told her; and David—she must remember that David was now at the head of an immense undertaking and was carrying a heavy load of responsibility. She was silenced, but he could see that his well-meant effort had been thrown away.
This happened on an evening when the two fishermen had been three days in the wilds of the upper Timanyoni. On the next morning the monotonies were broken. Little gossip of the big job penetrated to the Alta Vista, the summerers, as a rule, being content to hold the great engineering feat as a part of the scenic stage-effect for which they paid in their hotel bills. But on the morning in question, when Cumberleigh had joined a sunrise peak-climbing party, and Wishart was not yet out of bed, there was news of a small catastrophe. Oswald had the story from one of the Alta Vista clerks as he was getting his morning mail. Some time during the night an accident had happened in the big tunnel. In one of the blasts a man had been blown up and desperately hurt. A Brewster doctor had been telegraphed for and was coming up on a special train.
Oswald was interested only casually, and he saw no special significance in the added word particularizing the injured man as one of the railroad company’s inspectors. As he was crossing the lobby he met Miss Virginia. Though she was apparently just down from her rooms and on her way to breakfast, her first word was of the tragedy, or near-tragedy, in the tunnel.
“You have heard of the accident to Mr. Strayer?” she asked hurriedly. And then: “Have you seen David this morning?”