“I?” she queried with a surprised start. “Why, I’m quite well.”
“Well’s you were before you went up to the mines?”
A color came into her cheeks and she lowered her eyes:
“I’m a little tired, I think, and that always makes me look pale. It was a hard sort of trip, all those hours in the sleigh, and that hotel at Rocky Bar was a dreadful place. I couldn’t sleep. There was a cow somewhere near—it sounded as if it were in the next room—and the roosters all began to crow in the middle of the night. I’ll be all right to-morrow.”
Her father drew his coffee-cup toward him and dropped in a lump of sugar. No word had passed between him and his daughter as to the scene he had witnessed two days before in the parlor of Perley’s Hotel. She was ignorant of the fact that he had seen it and he intended that she should remain ignorant of it. But the next morning he had had an interview with Dominick Ryan, in which the young man, confronted with angry questions and goaded past reserve by shame and pain, had confessed the misery of his marriage and the love that in an unguarded moment had slipped beyond his control.
Cannon had said little to him. Beyond telling him that he must not see Miss Cannon again, his comments on Dominick’s confessions had been brief and non-committal. It was not his business to preach to Delia Ryan’s boy, and a large experience of men had given him a practically limitless tolerance of any and all lapses of which the human animal is capable. They only concerned him as they bore on his own affairs. In this particular case they did bear on his affairs, closely and importantly, on the affair of all others dearest and nearest to him—the happiness of his daughter. He knew that in this three weeks of imprisonment she had come to feel for Dominick Ryan a sentiment she had never before felt for any man. He had seen her in the young man’s arms, and, knowing Rose as he knew her, that was enough.
Driving down from Antelope in the sleigh he thought about it hard, harder than he had ever before in his life thought of any sentimental complication. He was enraged—coldly and grimly enraged—that his girl should have stumbled into such a pitfall. But it was not his habit to waste time and force in the indulgence of profitless anger. The thing had happened. Rose, who had been courted many times and never warmed to more than pity for her unsuccessful suitors, had suddenly, by a fateful, unpremeditated chance, met her mate—the man she loved. And the most maddening part of it was that he was the man of all others her father would have chosen for her had such a choice been possible.
He bit on his cigar, turning it over between his teeth, and looked sidewise at her as she sat silent in the sleigh beside him. She was unquestionably pale, pale and listless, her body wrapped in enveloping furs, sunk in an attitude of weariness, her eyes full of dejected reverie. Even to his blindly-groping, masculine perceptions her distrait looks, her dispirited silence, told of melancholy preoccupation. She was not happy—his Rose, who, if she had wanted it and he could have bought, begged or stolen it, would have had the moon.
To-night, in her white dress, the mellow radiance of the lamp throwing out her figure against the shadowy richness of the dining-room walls, she bore the same appearance of despondency. Her luster was dimmed, her delicate skin had lost its dazzling, separated bloom of pink and white, her glance was absent and unresponsive. Never, since the death of her mother, now ten years back, had he seen her when it was so obvious that she harbored an inner, unexpressed sense of trouble.
“I guess the city’s the best place for you,” he said. “Roughing it don’t seem to suit you if cows and chickens keep you awake all night. I’ve seen the time when the hotel at Rocky Bar would have been considered the top notch of luxury. I wish you could see the places your mother lived in when I first took her up there. You’re a spoiled girl, Rose Cannon.”