“I thought you had understood me perfectly from the first,” Charles Gould said, slowly. “I thought we had said all there was to say a long time ago. There is nothing to say now. There were things to be done. We have done them; we have gone on doing them. There is no going back now. I don’t suppose that, even from the first, there was really any possible way back. And, what’s more, we can’t even afford to stand still.”
“Ah, if one only knew how far you mean to go,” said his wife inwardly trembling, but in an almost playful tone.
“Any distance, any length, of course,” was the answer, in a matter-of-fact tone, which caused Mrs. Gould to make another effort to repress a shudder.
She stood up, smiling graciously, and her little figure seemed to be diminished still more by the heavy mass of her hair and the long train of her gown.
“But always to success,” she said, persuasively.
Charles Gould, enveloping her in the steely blue glance of his attentive eyes, answered without hesitation—
“Oh, there is no alternative.”
He put an immense assurance into his tone. As to the words, this was all that his conscience would allow him to say.
Mrs. Gould’s smile remained a shade too long upon her lips. She murmured—
“I will leave you; I’ve a slight headache. The heat, the dust, were indeed—I suppose you are going back to the mine before the morning?”