This he had got from following the spoor of beasts into the desolation of wood and desert; from the clean air of forests, drawn into lungs sobbing with fatigue; from the sun hardening fiber into iron, leaching out fat, binding muscles with sheathings of copper; from bread, often black and dry; meat roasted over embers, and the crystal water of springs. It was that gain above rubies, with which Nature rewards those walking with her in the waste places of the earth.
Ordinarily, such a person would have claimed the attention of the crowds along the road to Oban, but here, behind this old man and this girl, he was unnoticed.
The day was perfect. From the sea came the thin, weird cry of gulls, from the field behind him, the wail of pipes. Presently the two persons whom he followed stopped to speak with some one in a shop, and he overtook them on the road.
At this moment the Marchesa Soderrelli came through the shop door.
CHAPTER VI—THE MENACE
The Duke of Dorset had gone to tea on the American yacht. It was a thing which he had not intended to do when he came to Oban. The general conception of that nation current on the Continent of Europe had not impressed him with the excellence of its people. The United States of America was thought to be a sort of Spanish Main, full of adventurers, where no one of the old, sure, established laws of civilization ran. A sort of "house of refuge" for the revolutionary middle class of the world—the valet who would be a gentleman, the maid who would he a lady. It was a country of pretenders, posers, actors. Those who came out of it with their vast, incredible fortunes were, after all, only rich shopkeepers. They were clever, unusually clever, but they were masqueraders.
But, somehow, he could not attach either the one or the other of these two persons to this conception of the United States of America.
He did not stop to consider whether this curious old man, whose face, whose body, whose big, dominant manner recalled in suggestion those stone figures covered with vines forgotten in Asia, was a mere powerful bourgeois, grown rich by some idiosyncrasy of chance, a mere trader taking over with a large hand the avenues of commerce, a mere, big tropical product of a country, in wealth-producing resources itself big and tropical; or one of another order who had drawn this nation of middle class exiles under him, as in romances some hardy marquis had made himself the king of outlaws.