"It is a bad habit of yours. Of the famous mining pump, or the lawsuit, presumably?"
There was something in the speaker's manner which qualified the smile in her hazel eyes, and warned the man that his companion was merely bent on discovering how far he was disposed to respect the wishes she had not directly expressed. He, on his part, was wondering how he could best intimate that certain fears she entertained were groundless. He laughed softly, though a tinge of darker color crept into his tanned face as he remembered the uncompromising frigidity with which she had at first received him.
"I feel that I ought to say something civil," he said. "How could one think of the things you mention in such surroundings?"
The girl was in a variable mood, and she smiled mischievously.
"That is not civil. It implies that I expected you to. Tell me instead how the pump is progressing."
"The pump is not progressing," said the man. "In fact, it is standing still; and, though the court upheld my patent, it will probably continue to stand still for lack of capital. Capital is hard to acquire, you know."
"But you were well paid, and promoted several times on your merits in South America, were you not?" asked Miss Chatterton.
"I was lucky," Dane said quietly. "It was due to no merit of mine that my superiors died off with yellow fever; but when the inventor desires a fair share of the profit himself, it requires a good deal of money to start off pumps and similar inventions successfully."
"You are growing avaricious," declared Miss Chatterton, and let her eyes fall a little under the man's gaze.
"You are right," he said. "I would sell half my life to any one for the few thousand pounds the invention would repay twenty-fold; and somehow I shall get them."