“I found my affairs in very good condition,” Ridgway smiled. “But I am glad to be back in time to welcome to Mesa you—and Mr. Harley.”
“It seems so strange a place,” the girl ventured, with a hesitation that showed her anxiety not to offend his local pride. “You see I never before was in a place where there was no grass and nothing green in sight. And to-night, when I looked out of the window and saw streams of red-hot fire running down hills, I thought of Paradise Lost and Dante. I suppose it doesn’t seem at all uncanny to you?”
“At night sometimes I still get that feeling, but I have to cultivate it a bit,” he confessed. “My sober second thought insists that those molten rivers are merely business, refuse disgorged as lava from the great smelters.”
“I looked for the sun to-day through the pall of sulphur smoke that hangs so heavy over the town, but instead I saw a London gas-lamp hanging in the heavens. Is it always so bad?”
“Not when the drift of the wind is right. In fact, a day like this is quite unusual.”
“I’m glad of that. I feel more cheerful in the sunshine. I know that’s a bit of the child still left in me. Mr. Harley takes all days alike.”
The Wall Street operator was in slippers and house-jacket. His wife, too, was dressed comfortably in some soft clinging stuff. Their visitor saw that they had disposed themselves for a quiet uninterrupted evening by the fireside. The domesticity of it all stirred the envy in him. He did not want her to be contented and at peace with his enemy. Something deeper than his vanity cried out in protest against it.
She was still making talk against the gloom of the sulphur fog which seemed to have crept into the spirit of the room.
“We were reading before you came in, Mr. Ridgway. I suppose you read a good deal. Mr. Harley likes to have me read aloud to him when he is tired.”
An impulse came upon Ridgway to hear her, some such impulse as makes a man bite on sore tooth even though he knows he must pay later for it.