XXV
ON the following morning Ida, having seen Ora on the train bound for Chicago, went at once to a public garage, rented the touring car she had used the night before, and was driven out to the mines. She walked up to the cabin on the crest of Perch of the Devil and, finding it empty, summoned a miner who was lounging near and bade him call Mr. Compton. The man asked to be allowed to use the telephone in the office, obtained connection with the second level of the mine, and announced in a few moments that the boss was on his way up.
Ida, who had dropped wearily into a chair, merely nodded as Gregory entered. He was as pale as a dark man can be, and his voice when he spoke sounded as if he had been running.
“What is it?” he demanded. “Has anything happened——”
“To Ora? Nothing, except that she is on her way East and to Europe. Tired, no doubt, but quite well.”
Gregory drew a short sigh of relief, and sat down before his table, shading his eyes with his hand. “Well?” he asked. “What is it?”
“I haven’t come out here to make a scene, or even to reproach you. I believe that I should have the self-restraint to ignore the subject altogether if it were not for that man, Whalen. Some one must put an extinguisher on him at once and you are the one to do it. That is why I am obliged to tell you that I found out yesterday about you and Ora. I had begun to believe there must be some woman in the case but I had not the least suspicion of Ora. I not only believed her to be the soul of honour, but I thought she was really in love with the Marchese Valdobia, a Roman who has everything to offer that a woman of her type demands, and to marry whom she had demanded a divorce from Mark. She has been tacitly engaged to him ever since we left Europe.”
Ida saw the muscles in Gregory’s long body stiffen as if he were about to spring, and his eyes glitter through the lattice of his fingers. But he made no comment, and after giving him time to assimilate her information, she added more gently:
“Console yourself with the reflection that she would have thrown him over for you. But she knows now what a mistake she would have made. Ora is one of those atavistic Americans that are far more at home in Europe than in the new world. She has gone where she belongs and Valdobia is her man.”
She paused again. He was still silent, and she continued less fluently: “Now I come to the unpleasant part for myself. To begin at the beginning: I made an enemy of little Whalen before I went abroad. He had the sublime impudence to kiss me one day, and I simply took him by the back of his neck and the seat of his pants and threw him out of the window. He has had it in for me ever since.”