Bansemer found David Cable in his room upstairs—his smoking and thinking room, as he called it.
"Come in, Graydon; don't stop to knock. How are you? Cigarette? Take a cigar, then. Bad night outside, isn't it?"
"Is it? I hadn't—er—noticed," said Graydon, dropping into a chair and nervously nipping the end from a cigar. "Have you been downtown?"
"Yes. Just got in a few minutes ago. The road expects to do a lot of work West this year, and I've been talking with the ways and means gentlemen—a polite and parliamentary way to put it."
"I suppose we'll all be congratulating you after the annual election, Mr. Cable."
"Oh, that's just talk, my boy. Winemann is the logical man for president. But where is Jane?"
"She's—ah—downstairs, I think," said the tall young man, puffing vigorously. "I came up—er—to see you about Jane, Mr. Cable. I have asked her to be my wife, sir."
For a full minute the keen eyes of the older man, sharpened by strife and experience, looked straight into the earnest grey eyes of the young man who now stood across the room with his hand on the mantlepiece. Cable's cigar was held poised in his fingers, halfway to his lips. Graydon Bansemer felt that the man aged a year in that brief moment.
"You know, Graydon, I love Jane myself," said Cable at last, arising slowly. His voice shook.
"I know, Mr. Cable. She is everything to you. And yet I have come to ask you to give her to me."