"Large house," he observed.
Isabelle watched the people laughing and talking about the table, which was still covered with coffee cups and glasses. A sudden desire to be there, to hear what they were saying, seized her. A dark-haired man was leaning forward and emphasizing his remarks by tapping a wine glass with along finger. That might be Tom Darnell, she thought…. The other houses about the square were dark and gloomy, most of them closed for the summer.
"There's a good deal of money in Torso," Lane commented, glancing at a brick house with wooden pillars. "It's a growing place,—more business coming all the time."
He looked at the town with the observant eye of the railroad officer, who sees in the prosperity of any community but one word writ large,—TRAFFIC.
And that word was blown through the soft night by the puffing locomotives in the valley below, by the pall of smoke that hung night and day over this quarter of the city, the dull glow of the coke-ovens on the distant hills. To the man this was enough—this and his home; business and the woman he had won,—they were his two poles!
CHAPTER VI
"You see," continued Bessie Falkner, drawing up her pretty feet into the piazza cot, "it was just love at first sight. I was up there at the hotel in the mountains, trying to make up my mind whether I could marry another man, who was awfully rich—owned a mine and a ranch; but he was so dull the horses would go to sleep when we were out driving … And then just as I concluded it was the only thing for me to do, to take him and make the best of him,—then Rob rode up to the hotel in his old tattered suit—he was building a dam or something up in the mountains—and I knew I couldn't marry Mr. Mine-and-Ranch. That was all there was to it, my dear. The rest of the story? Why, of course he made the hotel his headquarters while he was at work on the dam; I stayed on, too, and it came along—naturally, you know."
Mrs. Falkner dipped into a box of candy and swung the cot gently to and fro. The men were still talking inside the house and the two wives had come outside for long confidences. Isabelle, amused by this sketch of the Colorado courtship, patted the blond woman's little hand. Mrs. Falkner had large blue eyes, with waving tendrils of hair, which gave her face the look of childish unsophistication;—especially at this moment when her voluptuous lips were closing over a specially desired piece of candy.
"Of course it would come along—with you!"
"I didn't do a thing—just waited," Bessie protested, fishing about the almost empty box for another delectable bit. "He did it all. He was in such a hurry he wanted to marry me then and there at the hotel and go live up in the mountains in a cabin above the dam where he was at work. He's romantic. Men are all like that then, don't you think? But of course it couldn't be that way; so we got married properly in the fall in Denver, and then came straight here. And," with a long sigh, "we've been here ever since. Stuck!"