“Good deal of a sacrifice for her people to go with her way out there.”
“She couldn’t leave them behind. Father half-blind—mother a cripple. I understand that Arizona air is bracing them, too.”
“The fellow’s own mother was one of the party, wasn’t she?”
“I believe so. He’s all she has.”
“I don’t see, with all those people to chaperon her, why she couldn’t have gone along with him without marrying him,” observed Lockwood in a gruff tone.
Anthony smiled. “That would have been a Tantalus draught indeed,” he remarked. “I imagine poor Huntington will need all the concessions he can get if he keeps on breathing even Arizona air.”
“Anthony,” said Lockwood, after a silence of some minutes, during which he had puffed away with his eyes intent on the fire, “do you fancy Rachel Redding cared enough for that man to immolate herself like that?”
“Looks very much like it.”
“I know it looks like it; but if I read that girl right she was the sort to stick to anything she’d said she’d do, if it took the breath out of her body. How long had she known him—any idea?”
“A good while, I believe.”