He paced the little engine room slowly, chin on breast, gazing unseeing at the tiles on the floor. "I'll tell her not to come again," he said to himself. For he was a very conscientious and a very ambitious young man.
That was decided. He threw back his shoulders and raised his head with a feeling of relief. Going out into the boiler house, he opened the furnace doors, and taking a fire rake in his hands, pushed back the banked fires and spread them over the grates, he sprinkled a few shovels full of coal over them, opened the dampers, blew down the gauge glasses, and went into his little office again to read.
Mostly he read technical works, but the book he picked up now contained the life story of George Stephenson. There was a full page portrait in it too: this fascinated the young engineer—he gazed at it long and earnestly. To him it seemed the face of the greatest of all Englishmen, of all men; statesmen, soldiers, philosophers, none of them had left such a monument behind them, none had done so much for civilization as this great man whose features he gazed upon. "And he was a fighter, too," he said to himself. "Beat the prize fighter bully of his village, and without training. He must have been always fit and lived very straight and clean." He put down the book and went outside.
The sun was now bright and powerful, but still low down in the sky. The young engineer gazed all around at the fairy scene, enchanted with the beauty of the landscape; yet he carried in his mind's eye still the frontispiece of the book, a strong, sturdy figure, and a firm, composed, yet kindly face. The picture seemed to haunt him. "The ideal engineer," he said to himself, "would never get angry, only think, think, deeper and deeper. He would be absolutely firm, but not a brute. The engineer must handle men as well as material, and this north country collier did it!" He felt his biceps. "A great engineer of to-day has laid it down that physical fitness is the essential ground work of engineering success."
"Why not me too?" he asked himself.
Next night the gipsy girl appeared earlier than usual, he was not outside, and she ventured timidly in, walking on tip-toe, her eyes glancing quickly all round her. She advanced to the foot of the switchboard steps and stayed there.
He saw her then and went down to speak to her. She held out her hand. He took it gravely. She looked up at him underneath her long lashes, then her eyes drooped, the colour mounted to her cheek, she let her hand rest limply in his. He looked at her steadily for a minute, holding her hand, then he drew her towards him and kissed her.
"You like kissing," he said. She looked up at him with all her soul in her wonderful dark eyes.
"Yes—you," she said, simply.
"Go and sit down, I've got some work to do yet. My coat's hanging up in the office there. There's some sweets in the pocket, take them out."