“It puzzles me,” he said in a fine, mellow voice, “why I should find this rotten limestone cropping out here. Now, in the blue limestone of the Niagara period I was as sure of finding it as I am—”
“Of not finding me at all,”—it came queenly, haughtily from her.
He turned, and the thick lenses of his glasses were focused on her—a radiant, superb being. Then there were swept away all his abstractions and deductions, and in their place a real smile—a lover's smile of satisfaction looking on the paradise of his dreams.
“You know I have always worshiped you,” he said simply and reverently.
She moved up in a sisterly way to him and looked into his face.
“Clay—Clay—but you must not—I have told you—I am engaged.”
He did not appear to hear her. Already his mind was away off in the hills where his eyes were. He went on: “Now, over there I struck a stratum of rotten limestone—it's a curious thing. I traced that vein of coal from Walker County—clear through the carboniferous period, and it is bound to crop out somewhere in this altitude—bound to do it.”
“Now it's just this way,” he said, taking her hand without being conscious of it and counting off the periods with her fingers. “Here is the carboniferous, the sub-carboniferous—” She jerked her hand away with what would have been an amused laugh except that in a half conscious way she remembered that Harry had held her hand but half an hour ago; and it ended in a frigid shaft feathered with a smile—the arrow which came from the bow of her pretty mouth.
He came to himself with a boyish laugh and a blush that made Helen look at him again and watch it roll down his cheek and neck, under the fine white skin there.
Then he looked at her closely again—the romantic face, the coil of brown hair, the old gown of rich silk, the old-fashioned corsage and the rich old gold necklace around her throat.