"Quite. I think I made up my mind last night to do it--if you should ask me. It was after our ride on the engine; after my father had let me see what was in his mind."
"Ah, yes--your father. He will be very angry, won't he?"
"But you will not let him make you recant?"
She laughed joyously. "You think you are in love with me, and yet that shows how little you really know of me, or of the family characteristics. We have plenty of unlovelinesses, but fickleness isn't one of them."
"Forgive me," he said, humbly; "but it seems to me there is so little to hold you, and so much to turn you aside. I----"
A series of shrill shrieks from the locomotive in the valley below interrupted him, and he rose reluctantly. "They're calling us in; we'll have to go."
She took his arm and they ran down the steep declivity, across the small plateau, and so on to the bottom of the railway cutting. Just before they reached the train, Brockway asked if he should tell the Burtons.
"As you please," she replied. "I shall tell my father and Cousin Jeannette as soon as we get back."
They found the passengers all aboard and the train waiting for them, and Mrs. Burton scolded them roundly for their misdeeds.
"We had a mind to go off and leave you," she said; "it would have served you right for running away. Where ever have you been?"
"Up on the hill, taking in the scenery," Brockway replied; and Gertrude abetted him with an enthusiastic description of Gray's Peak as seen from the plateau--a description which ran on without a break until the train paused at Silver Plume, where the Tadmorians debarked to burrow in a silver mine. Burton burrowed with them, as a matter of course, but his wife declined to go.
"I shall stay right here and keep an eye on these truants," she declared, with great severity. And Brockway and Gertrude exchanged comforting glances--as who should say, "What matters it now?"--and clasped hands under cover of the stir of debarkation. And Mrs. Burton saw all this without seeming to, and rejoiced gleefully at the bottom of her match-making heart.
When the Tadmorians had inspected the mine, and had come back muddy and besprinkled with water and besmirched with candle-drippings, the train went on its way down the canyon. Having done what he might toward pumping the well of tourist curiosity dry on the outward journey, Burton was given a little rest during the afternoon; and the quartette sat together in the coach and talked commonplace inanities when they talked at all. And the burden of even this desultory conversation fell mainly upon the general agent and his wife. The two young people were tranquilly happy, quite content to be going or staying, or what not, so long as they could be together.