“No, thanks. There’s nothing much to bother about. Good night, Berny,” and he stepped back into the room and shut the door.

Berny sat as he had left her for a space, and then drew back upon the divan and leaned against the mound of pillows. She made the movement charily and slowly, her face set in a rigidity of thought to which her body seemed fixed and obedient. She sat thus for an hour without moving, her eyes staring before her, two straight lines folded in the skin between her brows.

So he was still angry, angry and unforgiving. That was the way she read his behavior. The coldness that he exhaled—that penetrated even her unsensitive outer shell—she took to be the coldness of unappeased indignation. He had never before been just like this. There was a something of acquired forbearance and patience about him—a cultivated thing, not a spontaneous outward indication of an inner condition of being—which was new to her observation. He was not sulky or cross; he was simply withdrawn from her and trying to hide it under a manner of careful, guarded civility. It was different from any state she had yet seen him in, but it never crossed her mind that it might be caused by the influence of another woman.

He was still angry—that was what Berny thought; and sitting on the divan under the canopy with its fiercely-poised lances she meditated on the subject. His winning back was far from accomplished. He was not as “easy” as she had always thought. A feeling of respect for him entered into her musings, a feeling that was novel, for in her regard for her husband there had previously been a careless, slighting tolerance which was not far removed from contempt. But if he had pride enough to keep her thus coldly at arm’s length, to withstand her attempts at forgiveness and reconciliation, he was more of a man than she thought, and she had a harder task to handle than she had guessed. She did not melt into anything like self-pity at the futility of her efforts, which, had Dominick known of them, would have seemed to him extremely pathetic. That they had not succeeded gave her a new impetus of force and purpose, made her think, and scheme with a hard, cool resolution. To “make up” and gain ascendancy over Dominick, independent and proudly indifferent, was much more worth while than to bully Dominick, patient, enduring, and ruled by a sense of duty.

CHAPTER XI
THE GODS IN THE MACHINE

On the second Sunday after their return from Antelope, Bill Cannon resolved to dedicate the afternoon to paying calls. This, at least, was what he told his daughter at luncheon as he, she, and Gene sat over the end of the meal. To pay calls was not one of the Bonanza King’s customs, and in answer to Rose’s query as to whom he was going to honor thus, he responded that he thought he’d “start in with Delia Ryan.”

Rose made no comment on this intelligence. The sharp glance he cast at her discovered no suggestion of consciousness in the peach-like placidity of her face. It gratified him to see her thus unsuspecting, and in the mellowing warmth of his satisfaction he turned and addressed a polite query to Gene as to how he intended spending the afternoon. Gene and Rose, it appeared, were going to the park to hear the band. Gene loved a good band, and the one that played in the park Sunday afternoons was especially good. The Sunday before, Gene had heard it play Poet and Peasant and the Overture of William Tell, and it was great! That was one of the worst things about living on a ranch, Gene complained, you didn’t have any music except at the men’s house at night when one of the Mexicans played on an accordion.

The old man, with his elbow on the table, and a short, blunt-fingered hand stroking his beard, looked at his son with narrowed eyes full of veiled amusement. When he did not find Gene disagreeably aggravating as his only failure, he could, as it were, stand away from him and realize how humorous he was if you took him in a certain way.

“What’s the Mexican play?” he growled without removing his hand.

“La Paloma,” answered Gene, pleased to be questioned thus amicably by his autocratic sire, “generally La Paloma, but he can play The Heart Bowed Down and the Toreador song from Carmen. I want him to learn the Miserere from Trovatore. It’s nice to sit on the porch after dinner and listen while you smoke.”