“Hasn’t everybody who goes into business speculations to do that now and then?”
“No,” said Stirling, reflectively, “I don’t think they have. Quite often the people who deal with them have to face part of the hazard. In a general way they’ve something to fall back on if they’re men of position: the money they’ve settled on their wives, a name that would get them credit on the market, or friends who’d give them a lift if they came down with a bang. Now, that young man has nothing. If he fails, he won’t have a dollar to get out of this city with, for the mine won’t count. He can’t even hold it unless he puts in his assessment work on it, and he couldn’t do that without something to live on in the meanwhile. He hasn’t a friend in Canada from whom he could borrow a dollar.”
Ida said nothing, and Stirling added, as if in explanation:
“I might be willing to give him a lift if it were absolutely necessary, but it seems that he’s quite determined not to take a favor from me. He didn’t offer me any reason for adopting that attitude.”
He looked at the girl rather curiously, and she noticed the significance of his last sentence. Stirling had not said that he was unacquainted with Weston’s reason, but he seemed to be waiting for her to make a suggestion, and she found the situation embarrassing.
“Well,” she said, “he probably has one that seems sufficient to him.”
Stirling said nothing further on the subject, and presently went out and left her; but her expression changed when he had done so, and she sat very still, with one hand tightly closed, for she now realized what the cost of her lover’s defeat might be. In his case it would not mean a grapple with temporary difficulties, or a curtailing of unnecessary luxuries, but disaster complete and irretrievable, perhaps for years. If he failed, he would vanish out of her life; and it was becoming rapidly clear that, however hard pressed he might be, there was, after all, no way in which she could help him. The unyielding pride or stubbornness which animated him at length appeared an almost hateful thing.
Ida did not sleep particularly well that night, and when she went down to breakfast rather late the next morning there was a letter beside her plate. She looked up at her father when she had opened it.
“Susan Frisingham is coming here from Toronto for a day or two before she goes back to New York,” she said. “She suggests taking me back with her.”
“Ah!” said Stirling, with a barely perceptible trace of dryness. “You don’t want to go just now?”