“‘Critical and important’ sounds large,” she returned.
“And the awakening was sudden,” he continued. “You must make allowance, please, for--”
“For the brusque appearance of a very unimaginative, substantial, and undreamlike person? I do. And now, since you will not put me quite at my ease by assuming, in words, that I have been properly ‘chaperoned’ here, I must inform you that my father waits hard by--is, as my riotous young brother says, ‘without on the mat.’”
“I am very glad,” he replied with more politeness than exactness.
“That I was duly escorted, or that my father is ‘without on the mat’? ... However, you do not appear glad one way or the other. And now I must explain our business. It is to ask your company at dinner (do consider yourself honoured--actually a formal dinner party in the Rockies!) to meet the lieutenant-governor, who is coming to see our famous Viking and Sunburst.... But you are expected to go out where my father feeds his--there, see--his horse on your ‘trim parterre.’ And now that I have done my duty as page and messenger without a word of assistance, Mr. Roscoe, will you go and encourage my father to hope that you will be vis-a-vis to his excellency?” She lightly beat the air with her whip, while I took a good look at the charming scene.
Roscoe looked seriously at the girl for an instant. He understood too well the source of such gay social banter. He knew it covered a hurt. He said to her: “Is this Ruth Devlin or another?”
And she replied very gravely: “It is Ruth Devlin and another too,” and she looked down to the chasm beneath with a peculiar smile; and her eyes were troubled.
He left her and went and spoke to her father whom I had joined, but, after a moment, returned to Ruth. Ruth turned slightly to meet him as he came. “And is the prestige of the house of Devlin to be supported?” she said; “and the governor to be entertained with tales of flood and field?”
His face had now settled into a peculiar calmness. He said with a touch of mock irony: “The sailor shall play his part--the obedient retainer of the house of Devlin.”
“Oh,” she said, “you are malicious now! You turn your long accomplished satire on a woman.” And she nodded to the hills opposite, as if to tell them that it was as they had said to her: those grand old hills with which she had lived since childhood, to whom she had told all that had ever happened to her.