"Not being a mind-reader, I can't say what Wingfield knows—or thinks he knows. Our disagreement turned upon his threat to make literary material out of—well, out of matters that were in a good measure my own private and personal affairs."
"Oh; so there was a quarrel? That is more than you were willing to admit a moment ago."
"You dignify it too much. I believe I called him an ass, and he called me an idiot. There was no bloodshed."
"You are jesting again. You always jest when I want to be serious."
"I might retort that I learned the trick of it from you—in the blessed days that are now a part of another existence."
"Oh!" she said; and there was so much more of distress than of impatience in the little outcry that he was mollified at once.
"I'm going to crank the engines and send you home," he asseverated. "I'm not fit to talk to you to-day." And he started the engines of the motor-car.
She put a dainty foot on the clutch-pedal. "You'll come up and see me?" she asked; adding: "Some time when you are fit?"
"I'll come when I am needed; yes."
He walked beside the slowly moving car as she sent it creeping down the mesa hill on the brakes. At the hill-bottom turn, where the camp street ended and the roundabout road led off to the temporary bridge, she stopped the car. The towering wall of the great dam, with its dotting of workmen silhouetted black against the blue of the Colorado sky, rose high on the left. She let her gaze climb to the summit of the huge dike.