It was the new Philip who turned his face away and said, quite humbly: “I’m not fit to go to her now, Harry; you know that. It would be a sacrilege—another and worse indecency—to go to her with the smell of the pit-fires still in my clothes. I love her too well for that.”
“But you have never told her so.”
“No; and it is too late, now.”
The play-boy got out of his chair.
“Perhaps you are right, Phil; I won’t say you are not. Is there anything I can do toward helping you in the make-ready?”
“No; nothing that I think of. I’ll outfit in Leadville.”
“All right; I’ll be at the train to see you off.” And as he shook hands at parting: “Don’t you know, Phil, there are times when I almost envy you your confounded old burn-yourself-at-the-stake Puritan conscience? There are, for a fact; and this is one of them. Good-by—till this evening.”
XXVIII
“I don’t believe I can climb any higher, Harry; the air up here is so frightfully thin. You and Mysie go on if you want to. I’ll sit down and wait for you. I wouldn’t ask for any grander view than this is, right here from this rock.”
Spring had come again for the altitudes, and though the higher peaks of the Continental Divide were still heavily blanketed with snow, the gulches were free and the mountain streams were running bank full. Bromley, with an ulterior motive that he was still carefully concealing, had won Mrs. Dabney’s consent to take Jean and Mysie on a flying trip to the summit of the Great Divide, saying it was a shame that, after a residence of two years in Denver, the girls had not yet seen any more of the mountain grandeurs than could be glimpsed from a car window on a Sunday excursion up one of the canyons.