A flush came to his cheeks and a light to his eyes as he looked steadily at the page. Strange what power a written word may have to stir a man to the depths of his being! As Radlett read the names, he felt the years slip away from him. Five, six years was it since that summer at Bar Harbor when he and Jean Cameron had climbed together about the cliffs of the spouting horn or, staff in hand, had explored Duck Brook or floated idly in his canoe around the islands in the harbor? Like Loring he had dreamed his dream of what might be. By the end of the summer he knew it was only a dream of what might have been. He carried away with him an ideal, an aching heart, and a knot of ribbon of the Cameron plaid. But he was a man of too much force and energy to spend his life in bewailing the past. He had shut the knot of ribbon in a secret drawer, set the ideal in a shrine, and flung his heart into business with such success that to-day, while he was still a young man, he was already a power to be reckoned with in the financial world, while a golden career opened ahead of him.
A man so loyal in his friendship could not be other than loyal in his love; but he had put the possibility of winning Jean Cameron definitely out of his mind, and he would have sworn that the years had reduced the fever of his feeling to a genial tranquillity of friendship, when now at the very sight of her name on a hotel register, all his philosophy was put to flight and he was conscious only of a burning desire to see her once more.
Being a man of action, he wasted no time on reminiscence; but inquired in quick incisive terms whether Mr. Cameron and his daughter were still at the hotel. Learning that they were, he sent up his card. Then he lighted a cigarette and walked the floor of the lobby, smoking nervously till the bell-boy returned to say that Mr. Cameron would be glad to receive him in his private sitting-room. Before following the boy, Radlett stopped at the desk to arrange for his room and get his key.
“How good a room do you wish, sir, and how long will you stay?”
“The best you have, and as long as I choose,” Radlett answered with characteristic brevity. A moment later he stood before the door of the Camerons’ sitting-room, which opened at his knock to reveal Mr. Cameron’s bristling red head in the foreground, and in the background a figure in a traveling dress of gray cloth, with a hat to match and a knot of plaided ribbon under the brim.
At sight of Radlett, Jean rose, smiling, but with a slight consciousness in her manner, a consciousness resulting from the remembrance of a painful scene, the hope that the man before her had quite forgiven and the slighter hope, a mere faint ashamed shadow of a hope, that he had not quite forgotten.
Her mind must have been quickly set at rest on that point, for such a rush of feeling swept over Radlett that he could scarcely make his greetings intelligible. Mr. Cameron gave him a firm grip, and Jean held out a gray gloved hand which Radlett clasped tremulously. Mr. Cameron looked at the man and girl as they stood talking together, and the longer he looked the better he liked the combination.
“There would be a son-in-law to be proud of,” he thought, naturally enough perhaps considering him in that relation first. “Baird Radlett has everything that a girl could ask,—a hard head, a long purse, a free hand and an endless stock of common sense. And then, if I had him to help me, what a property I could build up! He used to seem devoted to Jean. But she could not have refused him—no, and by heaven she should not.” (Mr. Cameron liked to keep up even to himself the illusion that he was a tyrannical parent whose will was law.) “Rather different this man from Loring! Jean must see that. If she does not, she must be made to see it. I was afraid at one time that she might be foolish enough to fall in love with Loring; but I took it in time—I took it in time. Yet she is too efficient not to make some one big mistake in her life. We Camerons all do it sooner or later. If it is not one thing it is another—misdirected energy, I suppose—” Then aloud, in answer to a question from Radlett as to how he happened to be in that part of the world: “Why, about a year and a half ago I became interested in a mine in Arizona which was not being run properly, and so for the present I am giving up my time to managing it myself.”
“And have you too become a mining engineer?” Radlett asked of Jean.
“Not quite,” she laughed.