“Not until I have some better reason than a foolish little girl’s notion—no.”
“Hasn’t David told you what he thinks ought to be done?”
“Oh, yes, of course; the hard-rock men got him rattled, right at the start, and he came to me about it, boy-like.”
“And you told him to let it alone?”
“Sure I did. We are going to lose money enough on this job, as it is.”
The fine persistence was broken at last. The daughter of the luxuries—and the ideals—rose and moved toward the door. As she reached the vestibule exit she turned and gazed at the big man filling the great arm-chair, and there was neither anger nor impatience in her eyes; only a profound depth of shocked disappointment and reproach.
“I never knew you could be so hard and pitiless,” she said slowly. “If this is what money and the love of it can do to you——” The swing door of the vestibule yielded under her hand and she went out, leaving the sentence unfinished.
At the car-steps the negro porter had placed his carpeted foot-stool, but Silas Plegg was not there to see the president’s daughter safely across the tracks. It is conceivable that she did not mark the omission. From childhood she had known construction yards and the paraphernalia of the contracting trade, and her father was fond of boasting that she was as self-reliant as any boy.
Picking her way in the gathering dusk around the obstructing cars filled with building material, she came presently to the foot of the path leading up to the Inn. Out of the first clump of scrub pine on the hill trail a woman darted into the path and blocked it. Virginia Grillage stopped short with a little gasp of apprehension. Then she saw who it was.
“You—Judith? were you looking for me?”