The Colonel thought he meant business deals.
“You often risked too much; you were once on the brink of disaster.”
“More than once,” answered Floyd, “but now things seem to be going my way. I would like to do some philanthropic construction work; a man must have something to keep him from drying up.”
There was a responsive flash from the Colonel.
“I thought I was the only one who thought like that.”
Floyd looked around at the crowded room; there was laughter, jingling of glasses, the perfume of good tobacco.
“I think they all do!”
8
Joseph had spent the winter in Geneva, studying the classic and modern languages. In the spring he joined a band of students, on a walking tour through the mountains. At Tarasp he bade them good-bye—he was going to see the Val Sinestra, where his mother, years before, had been caught in a storm and where his father’s best friend, his Uncle Martin, had been lost in the mountains.
He passed the hotel, climbed down into the ravine, and stood before the little chapel, where by a strange coincidence they had met Father Cabello. He pushed open the door. How old it was, how very old!—the fading wall pictures, the broken windows, the time-stained Virgin and Child looming up out of the shadows. There was a sudden impulse to go to her, to speak to her, as he used to, when she was living to him. He gazed and gazed; she was drawing him down the aisle—