"You have been home all summer?" she asked.
"At home and on the road, trying to hypnotize somebody into buying something--anything--made out of cast-iron. Ah, girl! it's been a bitter fight!"
She was instantly sympathetic; more, there was a little thrill of vicarious triumph to go with the sympathy. She was sure he had won, or was winning, the battle.
"We read something about the hard times in the American papers," she said. "You don't know how far away anything like that seems when there is an ocean between. And I was hoping all the time that our homeland down here was escaping."
"Escaping? You came through South Tredegar a little while ago; it is dead--too dead to bury. You hear the sob of those blowing-engines?--you will travel two hundred miles in the iron belt before you will hear it again. When I came home in June we were smashed, like all the other furnaces in the South--only worse."
He forgot the tacit truce for the moment.
"Duxbury Farley and his son had deliberately wrecked the company."
"Let us understand each other," she said gently. "You must not say such things of Mr. Farley and--and his son to me. If you do, I can't listen."
"I believe you have convinced yourself. But you are vindictive; you know you are. And I mean to be fair and just."
He let the plodding horse measure a full half-mile before he turned and looked at her with anger and despair glooming in his eyes.
"Tell me one thing, Ardea, and maybe it will shut my mouth. What is Vincent Parley to you--anything more than Eva's brother?"
Another young woman might have claimed her undoubted right to evade such a pointed question. But Ardea saw safety only in instant frankness.
"I wonder if I have," she said half-musingly.
"Don't you _know_?" he demanded. And then, "Ardea, I'd rather see you dead and in your coffin!"
"It's Beauty and the Beast over again. You don't know Vint Farley."
"Don't I? My opportunities have been very much better than yours," she retorted.
"That may be, but I say you don't know him. He is a whited sepulcher."
"But you can not particularize," she insisted. "And the evidence is all the other way."
Tom was silent. During the summer of strugglings he had gone pretty deeply into the history of Chiawassee Consolidated, and there was commercial sharp practice in plenty, with some nice balancings on the edge of criminality. Once, indeed, the balance had been quite lost, but it was Dyckman who had been thrust into the breach, or who had been induced to enter it by falsifying his books. Yet these were mere business matters, without standing in the present court.