It was the realization of this, so much sharper in him who had seen and known, that checked and harassed Helmeth; he wished to be at one with them, to be felicitated on my success and my charm, to include me if only by implication, in that community of adventure with which these mining and engineering folk had ringed the earth. And the necessity of holding our relation down to the outward forms of friendship established on the supposition of our having grown up together, fretted him.
"It isn't honest," he broke out once after he had tried to persuade me to let him tell his friends that we were engaged. "It's all right between us; you are my wife in the sight of whatever gods there are, but that isn't what other people would call you."
"Somehow, Helmeth, so long as it is with you, I don't care much what they call me."
"Well, I care; I care a lot. You don't seem to remember you are going to be my girls' mother—sons' too, I hope. We ought to have some more children; Sanderson's got four." Sanderson had been our host at luncheon that day.
Helmeth was knocking out the ashes of his pipe on my hearthstone; he paused in the occupation of refilling it to look down at me in a moody kind of impatience that was the worst I knew of him. There was the suggestion of a cleft in his strong, square chin which came out whenever he bit hard on a difficult proposition. The play of it now was like the tiny shadow of disaster.
"I was down in old Brownlow's office the other day," he went on, "talking this Mexican scheme to him, and he had to break off in the middle of it to telephone to some chorus girl he had a date with. God! it made me hot to think of it!"
"Because I'm in the same——" He cut me off with a sound of vexation.
"Don't say it; don't even think of it! How long does this contract of yours last?"
"To the end of the season," I told him.
"Well, you chuck it just as soon as you can. I'll put this thing through somehow. We'll clear out of here." He had his pipe alight by now and began puffing more contentedly. "I don't think much of this burg anyway," he laughed as he settled himself in one of my chairs. "A man doesn't have a chance to get his feet on the ground."