She thought if he played any longer with that brandy glass she must cry out, but he drained it this time and pushed it away. With an effort of will she relaxed her tight muscles.
"I suppose I must have looked to you like a hopeless slacker," he said, "or you wouldn't have asked Darby to send me back to work. No,—I didn't mean to put it that way. I look like one to myself, that's all, when I stop to think. Only you don't know how it has felt, this last six weeks, to go on getting tighter and tighter in your head until you feel as if you were going to burst. I went out and got drunk, once,—just plain, deliberately boiled—in order to let off steam. It did me good, too, for the time being."
She didn't look shocked at that as he had expected her to—gave him only a rather wry smile and a comprehending nod. "We're all alike; that's the trouble with us," she said. "But you will take us out to Hickory Hill, won't you? Aunt Lucile and I. I'll promise we won't be in the way nor make you any more work."
She saw he was hesitating and added, "At that, perhaps, I may be some good. I could cook anyhow and I suppose I could be taught to milk a cow and run a Ford."
He laughed at that, then said a little uncomfortably that this wasn't what he had been thinking about. "I suppose you're counting on Graham's being in New York. He isn't. At least, he telegraphed me that he'd be back at Hickory Hill to-morrow morning. I knew you'd been rather keeping away from him and I thought perhaps…"
"No, that's all right." She said it casually enough, but it drew a keen look of inquiry from him, nevertheless. "Oh, nothing," she went on. "I mean I haven't made up with him. Of course, I never quarreled with him as far as that went. Only it's what I meant when I said just now that we were all alike, father and you and I. We all get so ridiculously—tight about things. Well, I've managed to let off steam myself."
He patted her hand approvingly. "That trip to Wyoming did you a lot of good," he observed.—"Or something did."
"They're wonderfully easy people to live with, Olive and Bob," she said. "They're immensely in love with each other I suppose, but without somehow being offensive about it. And they have such a lot of fun. Olive has a piebald cayuse, that she's taught all the haute ecole tricks. He does the statuesque poses and all the high action things just as seriously as a thoroughbred and he's so short and homely and in such deadly earnest about it that you can hardly bear it. You laugh yourself into stitches but you want to cry too. And Bob says he's going to train a mule the same way. If he ever does that pair will be worth a million dollars to any circus.—Well, we'll be doing things like that out at Hickory Hill some day. Because there is such a thing as fun left in the world."
"We'll have some of it this week," he agreed, and in this rather light-headed spirit they arranged details.
The only building at Hickory Hill that had been designed for human habitation was the farm-house and it was at present fully occupied and rather more by a camp cook and his assistant, the farm manager and half a dozen hands. The partners themselves slept in a tent. There was also a cook tent near the house where three meals a day were prepared for everybody, including the carpenters, masons, concrete men and well diggers who were working on the new buildings. They drove out in Fords from two or three near-by towns in time for breakfast and didn't go home till after supper. The wagon shed of the old horse barn served as a mess hall.