"Gad!" he exclaimed. "What a waste of muscle! You fellows with brains teeming with junk scorn the good things the Almighty has given you. Here's Stamford dying to have one little fibre of the sinew you ignore—and you thinking only of a lot of old bones that can't affect the price of cattle. Well, heigh-ho! Give me a month of you and I'll show you new things in life to glow over. You've the stature. Maybe you'll learn out here to use it."
The Professor turned to bow over Mary Aikens's hand, and she flushed with embarrassment and pleasure at the courtesy.
"Your husband has offered to share with me some of the fine things of life on the prairie," he said. "It is a prophecy of the scope he has, that I see before me the woman who shares that life with him."
Stamford recalled with a malicious twinkle a moment of intense chagrin in Inspector Barker's office.
"How ingenuous!" he murmured sweetly. "How simple and sweet and natural!"
The Professor's face went red. Isabel's eyes were dancing.
"I owe that to the Professor," Stamford explained to Cockney and Mary.
"One of the things I don't share is my wife," Cockney observed abruptly, and drove away with the buckboard.
Dinner—the night meal was dinner where Cockney gave the orders—was such a time of pleasant chatter and merry banter as the H-Lazy Z had never dreamed of, though there was a recurring element of constraint that puzzled Stamford. Cockney was a mass of varying moods, now laughing uproariously, now moody and watchful; and all the time Mary Aikens was rent by the conflicting emotions of delight, and of sensitiveness to her husband's humours. Afterwards Bean was dismissed, and the two women undertook the kitchen work. Cockney and Stamford smoked, the former the inevitable cigarette, the latter his short curved pipe. The Professor did not smoke; he seemed to have missed most of the habits of man. While the two others talked in the detached but perfectly satisfied periods of smokers, he drifted to the piano and turned over the music.
And presently, so softly and smoothly that no one seemed to know when he commenced, his fingers were moving over the keys to a quiet refrain he had picked up from the pile of music on the piano. When Stamford looked up, suddenly conscious of the melody of it, it was not the Professor he saw, but Mary Aikens standing in the doorway to the kitchen with the dish-towel in her hand, tears in her eyes. So close to the surface had the unexpected arrival of guests brought her emotions that she did not know she was showing them. Stamford heard Cockney draw a sharp breath, and the next instant his host stumbled up and went into the bedroom, closing the door behind him.