“It is a good name,” he said at length.
The boy took the book and placed the wisp of hair carefully between the pages as he closed it. He was still standing close against the knees of this man, as if he desired to help or comfort him, or longed for a little of the real father love he had never known. But Clayton, after that simple statement, dropped into silence. This absence of speech was not observed by Wingate, who had found in the story of the boy an opportunity to take up again the narrative of his introduction to Paradise and his life there since. Yet the boy noticed. His face flushed slowly; and when Clayton still remained mute and unresponsive, he slipped away, with a choke in his throat.
Shortly afterward he said good night to the visitor, kissed the dreamer on his bearded cheek, and with the Bible still in his hands crept away to bed. Wingate sat up until a late hour, talking of his dream, receiving now and then a monosyllabic assent to some prophetic statement. Having started at last to his room Clayton hesitated on the threshold and turned back.
“As you are the agent of the town company you could let one of those houses, I suppose?” was his unexpected inquiry.
The face of the dreamer flushed with pleasure.
“Most assuredly.”
“Then you may consider one of them rented—to me; it doesn’t matter which one. I think I should like to stop here awhile.”
It was one o’clock and the Sabbath was past. Wingate, his dream more vivid than it had been for months, sat down at his little writing desk, and in a fever of renewed hope began to pen a letter to the town company, announcing the letting of a house and prophesying an early revival of the boom.
CHAPTER II
WINGATE JOURNEYS ON
Justin Wingate tip-toed softly to and fro in front of the improvised book shelves and looked at the formidable array of books which, together with some furniture, had arrived for Clayton, and had been brought out from the town. The books were of a different character entirely from those which composed the minister’s scanty collection. Justin read the names slowly, without comprehension—“Spencer’s Synthetic Philosophy,” “Darwin’s Origin of Species,” “Tyndall’s Forms of Water,” and hard-worded titles affixed to volumes of the German metaphysicians. There were medical books too, a great many it seemed to the boy, in leather bindings, with gilt titles set in black squares on the backs.