“Miss Trednoke,” said he, gravely, “I have something to tell you, in order to clear myself from a possible misunderstanding. It may happen that I shall need your vindication with your father. Will you give it?”
“What vindication do you need, that I can give?” asked she, opening her dark eyes upon him questioningly.
“That’s what I wish to explain. I am in a difficult position. Would you mind stepping down into the garden? It won’t take a minute.”
Curiosity, if not especially feminine, is at least human. Miriam descended the steps, Freeman beside her. They strolled down the path, amidst the flowers.
“You said, yesterday,” he began, “that I would say one thing and be another. Now I am going to tell you what I am. And afterwards I’ll tell you why I tell it. In the first place, you know, I’m a civil engineer, and that includes, in my case, a good deal of knowledge about geology and things of that sort. I have sometimes been commissioned to make geological surveys for Eastern capitalists. Lately I’ve been canal-digging on the Isthmus; but the other day I got a notification from some men in Boston and New York to come out here on a secret mission.”
“Secret, Mr. Freeman?”
“Yes: you will understand directly. These men had heard enough about the desert valleys of this region to lead them to think that it might be reclaimed and so be made very valuable. Such lands can be bought now for next to nothing; but, if the theories that control these capitalists are correct, they could afterwards be sold at a profit of thousands per cent. So it’s indispensable that the object of my being here should remain unknown; otherwise, other persons might step in and anticipate the designs of this company.”
“If those are your orders, why do you speak to me?”
“There’s a reason for doing it that outweighs the reasons against it. I trust you with the secret: yet I don’t mean to bind you to secrecy. You will have a perfect right to tell it: the only result would be that I should be discredited with my employers; and there is nothing to warrant me in supposing that you would be deterred by that.”
“I don’t ask to know your secret: I think you had better say no more.”