VI
Clay believed that Alice Langham's visit to the mines had opened his eyes fully to vast differences between them. He laughed and railed at himself for having dared to imagine that he was in a position to care for her. Confident as he was at times, and sure as he was of his ability in certain directions, he was uneasy and fearful when he matched himself against a man of gentle birth and gentle breeding, and one who, like King, was part of a world of which he knew little, and to which, in his ignorance concerning it, he attributed many advantages that it did not possess. He believed that he would always lack the mysterious something which these others held by right of inheritance. He was still young and full of the illusions of youth, and so gave false values to his own qualities, and values equally false to the qualities he lacked. For the next week he avoided Miss Langham, unless there were other people present, and whenever she showed him special favor, he hastily recalled to his mind her failure to sympathize in his work, and assured himself that if she could not interest herself in the engineer, he did not care to have her interested in the man. Other women had found him attractive in himself; they had cared for his strength of will and mind, and because he was good to look at. But he determined that this one must sympathize with his work in the world, no matter how unpicturesque it might seem to her. His work was the best of him, he assured himself, and he would stand or fall with it.
It was a week after the visit to the mines that President Alvarez gave a great ball in honor of the Langhams, to which all of the important people of Olancho, and the Foreign Ministers were invited. Miss Langham met Clay on the afternoon of the day set for the ball, as she was going down the hill to join Hope and her father at dinner on the yacht.
"Are you not coming, too?" she asked.
"I wish I could," Clay answered. "King asked me, but a steamer-load of new machinery arrived to-day, and I have to see it through the Custom-House."
Miss Langham gave an impatient little laugh, and shook her head. "You might wait until we were gone before you bother with your machinery," she said.
"When you are gone I won't be in a state of mind to attend to machinery or anything else," Clay answered.
Miss Langham seemed so far encouraged by this speech that she seated herself in the boathouse at the end of the wharf. She pushed her mantilla back from her face and looked up at him, smiling brightly.
"'The time has come, the walrus said,'" she quoted, "'to talk of many things.'"
Clay laughed and dropped down beside her. "Well?" he said.