And now at last her wish to see these two men together was gratified. The girl’s radiant face revealed her excitement. Her voice was jubilant, her laughter rang out with delicious abandon. She was tingling with animation and lively interest. Her two friends could no more resist the impulse to laugh with her than one could refrain from smiling at the glee of a winsome child.
As they shook hands she watched them, looking from one to the other with an expression of such eager, anxious inquiry on her glowing countenance that the men were just a little embarrassed.
“I really should have come to see you long ago,” said Saint Jimmy. “The right sort of neighbors are not so plentiful in the Cañada del Oro that we can afford to neglect them. I have heard so much about you, though, that I feel as if you were really an old-timer whom I have known for years.”
Hugh Edwards did not appear at all displeased at the suggestion that the girl had been talking about him.
“And I,” he returned with an equally significant glance at Marta, “have heard so much about Doctor Burton that if there was ever a time when I didn’t know him I have forgotten it.”
Marta was delighted. She could not mistake the fact that the two men, as it sometimes happens, liked each other instantly. They seemed to know and understand each other instinctively. The truth is that the men themselves were just a little relieved to find this to be the fact.
Doctor Burton saw in Marta’s neighbor a man of more than ordinary personality. That one of such character and education should choose to live as Edwards was living, amid surroundings so foreign to the environment in which he had so evidently been born and reared, and should be content to occupy himself with such menial labor, was to Saint Jimmy a puzzling thing. But Saint Jimmy was too broad in his sympathies--too big in his understanding of life to be suspicious of everything that puzzled him. It would, indeed, have been difficult for any healthy-minded, clean-thinking person to be suspicious of Hugh Edwards.
And Hugh Edwards recognized instantly in Marta’s teacher that quality which led all men, except such poor characterless creatures as the Lizard, to speak in his presence with instinctive gentleness and deference.