“I have been listening to pæans all the evening,” she said. “And you deserve them. It’s a fine big thing you are attempting—the restoring of this old estate. And I know you have even bigger plans, too.”
He nodded, suddenly serious and thoughtful. “There’s a lot I’d like to do. It’s not only the house and grounds. There are ... other things. For instance, back on the mountain—on my own land—is a settlement they call Hell’s-Half-Acre. Probably it has well earned the name. It’s a wretched collection of hovels and surly men and drabs of women and unkempt children, the poorest of poor-whites. Not one of them can read or write, and they live like animals. If I’m ever able, I mean to put a manual-training school up there. And then—”
He ended with a half laugh, suddenly conscious that he was talking in a language she would scarcely understand—in fact, in a tongue new to himself. But there was no smile on her lips and her extraordinary eyes—cool gray, shot through with emerald—were looking into his with a frankness and sympathy he would not have guessed lay beneath her glacial placidity.
To Katharine, indeed, it made little difference what philanthropic fads the man she had chosen might affect as regarded his tenantry. Ambitions like these had a manorial flavor that did not displease her. And the Fargo millions would bear much harmless hammering. A change, subtle and incommunicable, passed over her.
“I shall think of you,” she sighed, “as working on in this splendid program. For it is splendid. But New York will miss you, John.”
“Ah, no. I’ve no delusions on that score. I dare say I’m almost forgotten there already. Here I have a place.”
Her head, leaned back against the cushion, turned toward him, the pale orchids trembling on her bosom—she was so near that he could feel her breath on his cheek. A new waltz had begun to sigh its languorous measures.
“Place?” she queried. “Do you think you had no place there? Is it possible that you do not understand that your going has left—a void?”
He looked at her suddenly, and her eyes fell. No sophisticated blushing this, though it was by such effective employment of her charms that her wonderful body and pliant mind had been drilled and fashioned from her babyhood. Katharine at the moment was as near the luxury of real embarrassment as she had ever been in her life.
Before he answered, however, the big form of Major Bristow appeared, looking about him.