"Why, there's Dorothy! She threatened to make the chief bring her down, but I didn't think she'd make it. Come along and I'll introduce you."
As, however, he mended his pace, Carter fell behind, and the sadness which had become habitual to his face deepened. He had heard the young fellow speak of this girl, his fiancée; and though in color and appearance she was the opposite of Helen, the swish of her skirts as she came to meet them, suggestion of perfume, the hundred elusive delicacies that make up a well-bred girl's personality, recalled his wife and oppressed him with a vivid sense of loss.
Her voice, rich and low in its tones as Helen's, strengthened the impression. "Dad said 'No,'" she laughed, after the introduction. "But—"
"Wilful woman will have her way," a voice declared from the interior of the tent; then the chief engineer, a hale man of fifty, appeared in the doorway. "Mosquitoes, alkali water, nothing would scare her." He was going on with inquiries of the health of a bridge that had developed rheumatic tendencies in its feet, when she laughingly interrupted:
"Come, dad, no business till after supper. I have already scraped acquaintance with the cook, and he says we are to come at once. So run along, little boys, and get ready."
"Wash our dirty faces, to put it plainly," the surveyor echoed her happy laugh. "Be it known unto you, fair lady, that ablutions are held to be effeminate, unnecessary, if not immoral, in construction work. However, in view of your hypersensitiveness, we will do violence to our inclinations. Come on, Carter—we for the tub."
But from a dozen yards she called him back. "This is the man you wrote me of? I knew him at once. What a splendid fellow!"
"Gorgeous!" he returned her whisper. "His wife must be a queer sort."
"Not necessarily." She added, with thoughtful intuition: "The possibilities are so many. Your friend is handsome and has a good face, but we girls are more complex than our mothers. While they were satisfied with good temper and good provision, we demand sympathy of taste and habit; that we touch without friction at a hundred points of contact. Tall as Mr. Carter is, he may fall short of such a standard."
Bending, her lover gazed admiringly into her earnest eyes. "Such a little wisehead! And did I pass in this difficult examination?"