"I know _him_--the mason, and I think it would be safer with him than with me."
"If he would take it from me like that--perhaps he need not know?" she asked.
"I think that he had better know!... Bring him to see me when he comes and we can talk it over together, all three of us," the judge suggested.
"And now I want you to give me the pleasure of lunching with me, a very simple old man's lunch, when we can talk about other things than money!" And with another gentle smile the judge took Adelle's arm and hobbled out to the next room.
A cheerful bar of sunlight fell across the small table between the two napkins and made the old silver gleam. Adelle felt more at peace, more calmly content with life, than she had since the death of her child. She was sure that somehow it was all coming out right, not only the money from Clark's Field, but also her own troubled life, although she could not see the precise steps to be taken. As usual her destiny, after leading her by many devious routes, brought her to the one door where she might obtain light....
"Tell me," said her host in his courteous tones, "about your California--I have always wanted to go there some day."
When Adelle descended from her room to the hotel parlor to meet her cousin on his arrival, she was conscious of trepidation. However the matter might turn out in the end, she must now give the young mason a first disappointment, and she was keenly aware of what that might be to him after dreaming his dream all these weeks of freedom and power that was unexpectedly to be his. She did not like to disappoint him, even temporarily, and she also felt somewhat foolish because she had so confidently assumed that it would be a simple matter to set the Clark inheritance right.
The stone mason was sitting cornerwise on his chair in the hotel room, twirling on his thumb a new "Stetson" hat that he had purchased as part of his holiday equipment. There was nothing especially bizarre in the costume that Tom Clark had chosen. Democracy has eradicated almost everything individual or picturesque in man's attire. The standard equipment may be had in every town in the land. There remains merely the fine distinction of being well dressed against being badly dressed, and Clark was badly dressed, as any experienced eye such as Adelle's could see at a glance. Nothing he had on fitted him or became him. A very red neck and face emerged from a high white collar, and those muscular arms that Adelle had always admired for their color of copper bronze and their free, graceful action, now merely prodded out the stiff folds of his readymade suit. His muscles seemed to resent their confinement in good clothes and played tricks like a naughty boy.