Brooke realized that she had heard nothing about his ride or the jumping of the Canopus, and determined that she should receive no enlightenment from him. This may have been due to wounded pride, but it afterwards stood him in good stead. Nor would he show that her chilly graciousness, which went just as far as the occasion demanded and no further, hurt him, and he accordingly roused himself, with an effort, to talk about the mine. The girl had usually appeared interested in the subject, and it was, at least, a comparatively safe one.
She, on her part, noticed the weariness in his eyes, and found it necessary to remind herself of his offences, for the story he told was not without its effect on her. It was, though he omitted most of his own doings, a somewhat graphic one, and she realized a little of the struggle he and the handful of men Devine had been able to send him had made, half-fed, amidst the snow. Still, for no very apparent reason, his composure and the way he kept himself in the background irritated her.
"One would wonder why you put up with so much hardship. Wasn't it a little inconsequent?" she said.
Brooke's gaunt face flushed. "Well," he said, "one is under the painful necessity of earning a living."
"Still, could it not be done a little more easily?"
"I don't know that it is, under any circumstances, a remarkably simple thing, but that is not quite the question, and, since you seem to insist, I'll answer you candidly. In my case, it was almost astonishingly inconsequent—that is, as I expect you mean, about the last thing any one would naturally have expected from me. Still, I felt that, after what I had done, I had a good deal to pull up, you see; though that is a motive with which, as I noticed when I mentioned it once before, you apparently can scarcely credit me."
Barbara smiled. "It was your own actions that made it difficult."
"I admitted on another occasion that I am not exactly proud of them, but there was some slight excuse. There usually is, you see."
"Of course!" said Barbara. "You need not be diffident. In your case there were the dollars of which my brother-in-law plundered you."
Brooke looked at her with a little glint in his eyes. "You," he said, slowly, "can be very merciless."