“No, David,” Kane went on, “when you take man out of the clutches of Nature, and put Nature in the keeping of man, we shall have the millennium. I have nothing to say against the millennium, per se, except that it never seems to have been on time. I am willing to excuse its want of punctuality; there may have always been unavoidable delays; but you can’t expect me to have as much faith in it as if it had never disappointed people. Now with you I admit it’s different. You’ve seen it come a great many times, and go even oftener.”
“Young man!” the other called so abruptly to Ray that it made him start in his chair, “I wish you would step out into the room yonder, and ask one of my daughters to bring me my whiskey and milk. It’s time for it,” and he put down a watch which he had taken from the table beside him.
He nodded toward a sort of curtained corridor at one side of the room, and after a glance of question at Kane, who answered with a reassuring smile, Ray went out through this passage. The voices had suddently fallen silent, but he found their owners in the little room beyond; they were standing before their chairs as if they had jumped to their feet in a feminine dismay which they had quelled. In one he made out the young Mrs. Denton, whose silhouette had received him and Kane; the other looked like her, but younger, and in the two Ray recognized the heroines of the pocket-book affair on the train.
He trembled a little inwardly, but he said, with a bow for both: “I beg your pardon. Your father wished me to ask you for his”—
He faltered at the queerness of it all, but the younger said, simply and gravely: “Oh, yes, I’ll take it in. I’ve got it ready here,” and she took up a tumbler from the hearth of the cooking-stove keeping itself comfortable at one side of a little kitchen beyond the room where they were, and went out with it.
Ray did not know exactly what to do, or rather how he should do what he wished. He hesitated, and looked at Mrs. Denton, who said, “Won’t you sit down—if it isn’t too hot here?”
XV.
“Oh, it isn’t at all hot,” said Ray, and in fact the air was blowing freely in through the plants at the open window. Then he sat down, as if to prove that it was not too hot; there was no other reason that he could have given for staying, instead of going back to Kane and her father.
“We can keep the windows open on this side,” said Mrs. Denton, “but the elevated makes too much noise in front. When we came here first, it was warm weather; it was stifling when we shut the windows, and when we opened them, it seemed as if the trains would drive us wild. It was like having them in the same room with us. But now it’s a little cooler, and we don’t need the front windows open; so it’s very pleasant.”
Ray said it was delightful, and he asked, “Then you haven’t been in New York long?”