He resumed his reading, and three or four minutes had slipped by when Florence turned to him with irritation in her manner.
"Haven't you anything to say, Elcot?" she broke out. "Are those crop statistics so very fascinating?"
Hunter looked up at her with a rather grim smile. She lay in a low cane chair beneath the lamp, with her figure falling into long sweeping lines, attired in costly fripperies lately purchased in the East, but there was not the least doubt that they became her. Indeed, with the satiny whiteness of her neck and arms half revealed beneath the gauzy draperies, and her hair gleaming lustrously about a face that had been carefully shielded from the ravages of the weather, she seemed strangely out of place in the primitively furnished room of a western homestead. The man noticed it, as he had done on other occasions, with a pang of regret. There had been a time when he had expected her to rejoice in his successes and console him in his defeats, and it had hurt when she had made it clear that any reference to his occupation only irritated her. He had got over that, as he had borne other troubles, with an uncomplaining quietness, and, though she had never suspected this, he had often felt sorry for her. Still, he was a man of somewhat unyielding character, and there was occasionally friction when he did what he considered most fitting, in spite of her protests.
"Well," he said in answer to her question, "they have, anyway, some interest to a farmer who has a good deal at stake." He threw the paper down. "Things in general aren't very promising, and I may be rather tightly fixed after the harvest. I seem to have been spending a great deal of money lately."
Florence felt guilty. After all, as she was the principal cause of his expenses, it was generous of him to put it as he had done. Indeed, she decided to make a confession about the loan from Nevis sometime when he appeared to be in an unusually favorable mood.
"You have a splendid crop, haven't you?" she asked.
"The trouble is that I may not get much for it, and a wheat crop is never quite safe until it's thrashed out. I'm uncertain about the weather."
"The aneroid has gone up; I looked at it."
"It's gone up too much and too suddenly," said Hunter. "That sometimes means a bad outbreak from the north."
Florence was moved by a sudden impulse. The man was bronzed and toughened by labor, but there was, as she had noticed since she came home, a jaded look in his face.