But by this time a smile of cynic pity had appeared upon the face of the railroad man.
"Hampstead," he exclaimed sharply, with a mimic shudder and a shrug of relief as if he had just escaped something, "you're not an actor. You're a preacher!"
"You're a moralist," asserted Scofield accusingly, "a puritanical, Sunday-school, twaddling moralist. I have misjudged you. I wouldn't want you around at all."
With a look akin to disgust upon his face, the railroad man made a motion with his fingers in the air as if ridding them of something sticky, and arose, not abruptly but decisively, making clear that the interview had proved disappointingly unprofitable and was therefore at an end.
John also arose, bewildered by the sudden change in Scofield's attitude--a change which he resented, and also the ground of it. He a preacher? The idea was ridiculous.
Besides, it makes an astonishing difference when one has been stubbornly refusing an offer to have the offer coolly and decisively withdrawn. Something subtly psychological made him want the offer back. The door of opportunity had been closed behind him with a snap so vicious that he wanted to turn and kick it open.
But the thin, talon-like hand of Scofield was hooking the young man's rather flaccid palm for a moment.
"Remember what I tell you," he barked out in parting. "You're not an actor. You're not a railroad man. You're a preacher!"
The last word was flung bitingly, like an epithet.
John, feeling uncomfortable, walked out and along one side of Union Square, casting a momentary wondering eye on the stabbing, twin towers of the Hotel St. Francis, many windowed and many-lighted; then turned on down Geary into Market and along that wide and cobbled thoroughfare to the doors of the old Palace Hotel. By the time he was in bed, he realized that Scofield had shaken him terribly. His decision was all to make over again.
However, Bessie would be there for three days to help him, and with this thought he felt comforted.
"It's been a great three days," sighed John, on the following Tuesday. Bessie also sighed.
They had clambered down from the parapet below the Cliff House and sat watching the seals at play upon the rocks a stone's throw out from beneath their feet. Their position marked the southern portal of the famous Golden Gate, through which a mile-wide stream of liquid blue was running. Across the Gate rose the sheer gray cliffs of Marin County and beyond those the rugged greens and blues of the mountains, spiked in the center by the peak of Tamalpais.