“But that does not prevent it, now that it’s a fact, from going anywhere and to some purpose,” said Stacy, turning away. He passed into the reading-room quietly, but in an instant turned and quickly descended by another staircase into the hall, hurriedly put on his overcoat, and slipping out was a moment later re-entering the hotel. Here he hastily summoned Barker, who came down, flushed and excited. Laying his hand on Barker’s arm in his old dominant way, he said:—

“Don’t delay a single hour, but get a written agreement for that Ditch property.”

Barker smiled. “But I have. Got it this afternoon.”

“Then you know?” ejaculated Stacy in surprise.

“I only know,” said Barker, coloring, “that you said I could back out of it if it wasn’t signed, and that’s what Kitty said, too. And I thought it looked awfully mean for me to hold a man to that kind of a bargain. And so—you won’t be mad, old fellow, will you?—I thought I’d put it beyond any question of my own good faith by having it in black and white.” He stopped, laughing and blushing, but still earnest and sincere. “You don’t think me a fool, do you?” he said pathetically.

Stacy smiled grimly. “I think, Barker boy, that if you go to the Branch you’ll have no difficulty in paying for the Ditch property. Good-night.”

In a few moments he was back at the club again before any one knew he had even left the building. As he again re-entered the smoking-room he found the members still in eager discussion about the new railroad. One was saying, “If they could get an extension, and carry the road through Heavy Tree Hill to Boomville they’d be all right.”

“I quite agree with you,” said Stacy.

CHAPTER III

The swaying, creaking, Boomville coach had at last reached the level ridge, and sank forward upon its springs with a sigh of relief and the slow precipitation of the red dust which had hung in clouds around it. The whole coach, inside and out, was covered with this impalpable powder; it had poured into the windows that gaped widely in the insufferable heat; it lay thick upon the novel read by the passenger who had for the third or fourth time during the ascent made a gutter of the half-opened book and blown the dust away in a single puff, like the smoke from a pistol. It lay in folds and creases over the yellow silk duster of the handsome woman on the back seat, and when she endeavored to shake it off enveloped her in a reddish nimbus. It grimed the handkerchiefs of others, and left sanguinary streaks on their mopped foreheads. But as the coach had slowly climbed the summit the sun was also sinking behind the Black Spur Range, and with its ultimate disappearance a delicious coolness spread itself like a wave across the ridge. The passengers drew a long breath, the reader closed his book, the lady lifted the edge of her veil and delicately wiped her forehead, over which a few damp tendrils of hair were clinging. Even a distinguished-looking man who had sat as impenetrable and remote as a statue in one of the front seats moved and turned his abstracted face to the window. His deeply tanned cheek and clearly cut features harmonized with the red dust that lay in the curves of his brown linen dust-cloak, and completed his resemblance to a bronze figure. Yet it was Demorest, changed only in coloring. Now, as five years ago, his abstraction had a certain quality which the most familiar stranger shrank from disturbing. But in the general relaxation of relief the novel-reader addressed him.

“Well, we ain’t far from Boomville now, and it’s all down-grade the rest of the way. I reckon you’ll be as glad to get a ‘wash up’ and a ‘shake’ as the rest of us.”

“I am afraid I won’t have so early an opportunity,” said Demorest, with a faint, grave smile, “for I get off at the cross-road to Heavy Tree Hill.”

“Heavy Tree Hill!” repeated the other in surprise. “You ain’t goin’ to Heavy Tree Hill? Why, you might have gone there direct by railroad, and have been there four hours ago. You know there’s a branch from the Divide Railroad goes there straight to the hotel at Hymettus.”

“Where?” said Demorest, with a puzzled smile.

“Hymettus. That’s the fancy name they’ve given to the watering-place on the slope. But I reckon you’re a stranger here?”

“For five years,” said Demorest. “I fancy I’ve heard of the railroad, although I prefer to go to Heavy Tree this way. But I never heard of a watering-place there before.”

“Why, it’s the biggest boom of the year. Folks that are tired of the fogs of ‘Frisco and the heat of Sacramento all go there. It’s four thousand feet up, with a hotel like Saratoga, dancing, and a band plays every night. And it all sprang out of the Divide Railroad and a crank named George Barker, who bought up some old Ditch property and ran a branch line along its levels, and made a junction with the Divide. You can come all the way from ‘Frisco or Sacramento by rail. It’s a mighty big thing!”

“Yet,” said Demorest, with some animation, “you call the man who originated this success a crank. I should say he was a genius.”

The other passenger shook his head. “All sheer nigger luck. He bought the Ditch plant afore there was a ghost of a chance for the Divide Railroad, just out o’ pure d–d foolishness. He expected so little from it that he hadn’t even got the agreement done in writin’, and hadn’t paid for it, when the Divide Railroad passed the legislature, as it never oughter done! For, you see, the blamedest cur’ous thing about the whole affair was that this ‘straw’ road of a Divide, all pure wildcat, was only gotten up to frighten the Pacific Railroad sharps into buying it up. And the road that nobody ever calculated would ever have a rail of it laid was pushed on as soon as folks knew that the Ditch plant had been bought up, for they thought there was a big thing behind it. Even the hotel was, at first, simply a kind of genteel alms-house that this yer Barker had built for broken-down miners!”

“Nevertheless,” continued Demorest, smiling, “you admit that it is a great success?”

“Yes,” said the other, a little irritated by some complacency in Demorest’s smile, “but the success isn’t HIS’N. Fools has ideas, and wise men profit by them, for that hotel now has Jim Stacy’s bank behind it, and is even a kind of country branch of the Brook House in ‘Frisco. Barker’s out of it, I reckon. Anyhow, HE couldn’t run a hotel, for all that his wife—she that’s one of the big ‘Frisco swells now—used to help serve in her father’s. No, sir, it’s just a fool’s luck, gettin’ the first taste and leavin’ the rest to others.”

“I’m not sure that it’s the worst kind of luck,” returned Demorest, with persistent gravity; “and I suppose he’s satisfied with it.” But so heterodox an opinion only irritated his antagonist the more, especially as he noticed that the handsome woman in the back seat appeared to be interested in the conversation, and even sympathetic with Demorest. The man was in the main a good-natured fellow and loyal to his friends; but this did not preclude any virulent criticism of others, and for a moment he hated this bronze-faced stranger, and even saw blemishes in the handsome woman’s beauty. “That may be YOUR idea of an Eastern man,” he said bluntly, “but I kin tell ye that Californy ain’t run on those lines. No, sir.” Nevertheless, his curiosity got the better of his ill humor, and as the coach at last pulled up at the cross-road for Demorest to descend he smiled affably at his departing companion.

“You allowed just now that you’d bin five years away. Whar mout ye have bin?”

“In Europe,” said Demorest pleasantly.

“I reckoned ez much,” returned his interrogator, smiling significantly at the other passengers. “But in what place?”

“Oh, many,” said Demorest, smiling also.

“But what place war ye last livin’ at?”

“Well,” said Demorest, descending the steps, but lingering for a moment with his hand on the door of the coach, “oddly enough, now you remind me of it—at Hymettus!”

He closed the door, and the coach rolled on. The passenger reddened, glanced indignantly after the departing figure of Demorest and suspiciously at the others. The lady was looking from the window with a faint smile on her face.

“He might hev given me a civil answer,” muttered the passenger, and resumed his novel.

When the coach drew up before Carter’s Hotel the lady got down, and the curiosity of her susceptible companions was gratified to the extent of learning from the register that her name was Horncastle.

She was shown to a private sitting-room, which chanced to be the one which had belonged to Mrs. Barker in the days of her maidenhood, and was the sacred, impenetrable bower to which she retired when her daily duties of waiting upon her father’s guests were over. But the breath of custom had passed through it since then, and but little remained of its former maiden glories, except a few schoolgirl crayon drawings on the wall and an unrecognizable portrait of herself in oil, done by a wandering artist and still preserved as a receipt for his unpaid bill. Of these facts Mrs. Horncastle knew nothing; she was evidently preoccupied, and after she had removed her outer duster and entered the room, she glanced at the clock on the mantel-shelf and threw herself with an air of resigned abstraction in an armchair in the corner. Her traveling-dress, although unostentatious, was tasteful and well-fitting; a slight pallor from her fatiguing journey, and, perhaps, from some absorbing thought, made her beauty still more striking. She gave even an air of elegance to the faded, worn adornments of the room, which it is to be feared it never possessed in Miss Kitty’s occupancy. Again she glanced at the clock. There was a tap at the door.

“Come in.”

The door opened to a Chinese servant bearing a piece of torn paper with a name written on it in lieu of a card.

Mrs. Horncastle took it, glanced at the name, and handed the paper back.

“There must be some mistake,” she said, “it do not know Mr. Steptoe.”

“No, but you know ME all the same,” said a voice from the doorway as a man entered, coolly took the Chinese servant by the elbows and thrust him into the passage, closing the door upon him. “Steptoe and Horncastle are the same man, only I prefer to call myself Steptoe HERE. And I see YOU’RE down on the register as ‘Horncastle.’ Well, it’s plucky of you, and it’s not a bad name to keep; you might be thankful that I have always left it to you. And if I call myself Steptoe here it’s a good blind against any of your swell friends knowing you met your HUSBAND here.”

In the half-scornful, half-resigned look she had given him when he entered there was no doubt that she recognized him as the man she had come to see. He had changed little in the five years that had elapsed since he entered the three partners’ cabin at Heavy Tree Hill. His short hair and beard still clung to his head like curled moss or the crisp flocculence of Astrakhan. He was dressed more pretentiously, but still gave the same idea of vulgar strength. She listened to him without emotion, but said, with even a deepening of scorn in her manner:—

“What new shame is this?”

“Nothing NEW,” he replied. “Only five years ago I was livin’ over on the Bar at Heavy Tree Hill under the name of Steptoe, and folks here might recognize me. I was here when your particular friend, Jim Stacy, who only knew me as Steptoe, and doesn’t know me as Horncastle, your HUSBAND,—for all he’s bound up my property for you,—made his big strike with his two partners. I was in his cabin that very night, and drank his whiskey. Oh, I’m all right there! I left everything all right behind me—only it’s just as well he doesn’t know I’m Horncastle. And as the boy happened to be there with me”—He stopped, and looked at her significantly.

The expression of her face changed. Eagerness, anxiety, and even fear came into it in turn, but always mingling with some scorn that dominated her. “The boy!” she said in a voice that had changed too; “well, what about him? You promised to tell me all,—all!”

“Where’s the money?” he said. “Husband and wife are ONE, I know,” he went on with a coarse laugh, “but I don’t trust MYSELF in these matters.”

She took from a traveling-reticule that lay beside her a roll of notes and a chamois leather bag of coin, and laid them on the table before him. He examined both carefully.

“All right,” he said. “I see you’ve got the checks made out ‘to bearer.’ Your head’s level, Conny. Pity you and me can’t agree.”

“I went to the bank across the way as soon as I arrived,” she said, with contemptuous directness. “I told them I was going over to Hymettus and might want money.”

He dropped into a chair before her with his broad heavy hands upon his knees, and looked at her with an equal, though baser, contempt: for his was mingled with a certain pride of mastery and possession.

“And, of course, you’ll go to Hymettus and cut a splurge as you always do. The beautiful Mrs. Horncastle! The helpless victim of a wretched, dissipated, disgraced, gambling husband. So dreadfully sad, you know, and so interesting! Could get a divorce from the brute if she wanted, but won’t, on account of her religious scruples. And so while the brute is gambling, swindling, disgracing himself, and dodging a shot here and a lynch committee there, two or three hundred miles away, you’re splurging round in first-class hotels and watering-places, doing the injured and abused, and run after by a lot of men who are ready to take my place, and, maybe, some of my reputation along with it.”

“Stop!” she said suddenly, in a voice that made the glass chandelier ring. He had risen too, with a quick, uneasy glance towards the door. But her outbreak passed as suddenly, and sinking back into her chair, she said, with her previous scornful resignation, “Never mind. Go on. You KNOW you’re lying!”

He sat down again and looked at her critically. “Yes, as far as you’re concerned I WAS lying! I know your style. But as you know, too, that I’d kill you and the first man I suspected, and there ain’t a judge or a jury in all Californy that wouldn’t let me go free for it, and even consider, too, that it had wiped off the whole slate agin me—it’s to my credit!”

“I know what you men call chivalry,” she said coldly, “but I did not come here to buy a knowledge of that. So now about the child?” she ended abruptly, leaning forward again with the same look of eager solicitude in her eyes.

“Well, about the child—our child—though, perhaps, I prefer to say MY child,” he began, with a certain brutal frankness. “I’ll tell you. But first, I don’t want you to talk about BUYING your information of me. If I haven’t told you anything before, it’s because I didn’t think you oughter know. If I didn’t trust the child to YOU, it’s because I didn’t think you could go shashaying about with a child that was three years old when I”—he stopped and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand—“made an honest woman of you—I think that’s what they call it.”

“But,” she said eagerly, ignoring the insult, “I could have hidden it where no one but myself would have known it. I could have sent it to school and visited it as a relation.”

“Yes,” he said curtly, “like all women, and then blurted it out some day and made it worse.”

“But,” she said desperately, “even THEN, suppose I had been willing to take the shame of it! I have taken more!”

“But I didn’t intend that you should,” he said roughly.

“You are very careful of my reputation,” she returned scornfully.

“Not by a d–d sight,” he burst out; “but I care for HIS! I’m not goin’ to let any man call him a bastard!”

Callous as she had become even under this last cruel blow, she could not but see something in his coarse eyes she had never seen before; could not but hear something in his brutal voice she had never heard before! Was it possible that somewhere in the depths of his sordid nature he had his own contemptible sense of honor? A hysterical feeling came over her hitherto passive disgust and scorn, but it disappeared with his next sentence in a haze of anxiety. “No!” he said hoarsely, “he had enough wrong done him already.”

“What do you mean?” she said imploringly. “Or are you again lying? You said, four years ago, that he had ‘got into trouble;’ that was your excuse for keeping him from me. Or was that a lie, too?”

His manner changed and softened, but not for any pity for his companion, but rather from some change in his own feelings. “Oh, that,” he said, with a rough laugh, “that was only a kind o’ trouble any sassy kid like him was likely to get into. You ain’t got no call to hear that, for,” he added, with a momentary return to his previous manner, “the wrong that was done him is MY lookout! You want to know what I did with him, how he’s been looked arter, and where he is? You want the worth of your money. That’s square enough. But first I want you to know, though you mayn’t believe it, that every red cent you’ve given me to-night goes to HIM. And don’t you forget it.”

For all his vulgar frankness she knew he had lied to her many times before,—maliciously, wantonly, complacently, but never evasively; yet there was again that something in his manner which told her he was now telling the truth.

“Well,” he began, settling himself back in his chair, “I told you I brought him to Heavy Tree Hill. After I left you I wasn’t going to trust him to no school; he knew enough for me; but when I left those parts where nobody knew you, and got a little nearer ‘Frisco, where people might have known us both, I thought it better not to travel round with a kid o’ that size as his FATHER. So I got a young fellow here to pass him off as HIS little brother, and look after him and board him; and I paid him a big price for it, too, you bet! You wouldn’t think it was a man who’s now swelling around here, the top o’ the pile, that ever took money from a brute like me, and for such schoolmaster work, too; but he did, and his name was Van Loo, a clerk of the Ditch Company.”

“Van Loo!” said the woman, with a movement of disgust; “THAT man!”

“What’s the matter with Van Loo?” he said, with a coarse laugh, enjoying his wife’s discomfiture. “He speaks French and Spanish, and you oughter hear the kid roll off the lingo he’s got from him. He’s got style, and knows how to dress, and you ought to see the kid bow and scrape, and how he carries himself. Now, Van Loo wasn’t exactly my style, and I reckon I don’t hanker after him much, but he served my purpose.”

“And this man knows”—she said, with a shudder.

“He knows Steptoe and the boy, but he don’t know Horncastle nor YOU. Don’t you be skeert. He’s the last man in the world who would hanker to see me or the kid again, or would dare to say that he ever had! Lord! I’d like to see his fastidious mug if me and Eddy walked in upon him and his high-toned mother and sister some arternoon.” He threw himself back and laughed a derisive, spasmodic, choking laugh, which was so far from being genial that it even seemed to indicate a lively appreciation of pain in others rather than of pleasure in himself. He had often laughed at her in the same way.

“And where is he now?” she said, with a compressed lip.

“At school. Where, I don’t tell you. You know why. But he’s looked after by me, and d–d well looked after, too.”

She hesitated, composed her face with an effort, parted her lips, and looked out of the window into the gathering darkness. Then after a moment she said slowly, yet with a certain precision:—

“And his mother? Do you ever talk to him of HER? Does—does he ever speak of ME?”

“What do you think?” he said comfortably, changing his position in the chair, and trying to read her face in the shadow. “Come, now. You don’t know, eh? Well—no! NO! You understand. No! He’s MY friend—MINE! He’s stood by me through thick and thin. Run at my heels when everybody else fled me. Dodged vigilance committees with me, laid out in the brush with me with his hand in mine when the sheriff’s deputies were huntin’ me; shut his jaw close when, if he squealed, he’d have been called another victim of the brute Horncastle, and been as petted and canoodled as you.”

It would have been difficult for any one but the woman who knew the man before her to have separated his brutish delight in paining her from another feeling she had never dreamt him capable of,—an intense and fierce pride in his affection for his child. And it was the more hopeless to her that it was not the mere sentiment of reciprocation, but the material instinct of paternity in its most animal form. And it seemed horrible to her that the only outcome of what had been her own wild, youthful passion for this brute was this love for the flesh of her flesh, for she was more and more conscious as he spoke that her yearning for the boy was the yearning of an equally dumb and unreasoning maternity. They had met again as animals—in fear, contempt, and anger of each other; but the animal had triumphed in both.

When she spoke again it was as the woman of the world,—the woman who had laughed two years ago at the irrepressible Barker. “It’s a new thing,” she said, languidly turning her rings on her fingers, “to see you in the role of a doting father. And may I ask how long you have had this amiable weakness, and how long it is to last?”

To her surprise and the keen retaliating delight of her sex, a conscious flush covered his face to the crisp edges of his black and matted beard. For a moment she hoped that he had lied. But, to her greater surprise, he stammered in equal frankness: “It’s growed upon me for the last five years—ever since I was alone with him.” He stopped, cleared his throat, and then, standing up before her, said in his former voice, but with a more settled and intense deliberation: “You wanter know how long it will last, do ye? Well, you know your special friend, Jim Stacy—the big millionaire—the great Jim of the Stock Exchange—the man that pinches the money market of Californy between his finger and thumb and makes it squeal in New York—the man who shakes the stock market when he sneezes? Well, it will go on until that man is a beggar; until he has to borrow a dime for his breakfast, and slump out of his lunch with a cent’s worth of rat poison or a bullet in his head! It’ll go on until his old partner—that softy George Barker—comes to the bottom of his d–d fool luck and is a penny-a-liner for the papers and a hanger-round at free lunches, and his scatter-brained wife runs away with another man! It’ll go on until the high-toned Demorest, the last of those three little tin gods of Heavy Tree Hill, will have to climb down, and will know what I feel and what he’s made me feel, and will wish himself in hell before he ever made the big strike on Heavy Tree! That’s me! You hear me! I’m shoutin’! It’ll last till then! It may be next week, next month, next year. But it’ll come. And when it does come you’ll see me and Eddy just waltzin’ in and takin’ the chief seats in the synagogue! And you’ll have a free pass to the show!”

Either he was too intoxicated with his vengeful vision, or the shadows of the room had deepened, but he did not see the quick flush that had risen to his wife’s face with this allusion to Barker, nor the after-settling of her handsome features into a dogged determination equal to his own. His blind fury against the three partners did not touch her curiosity; she was only struck with the evident depth of his emotion. He had never been a braggart; his hostility had always been lazy and cynical. Remembering this, she had a faint stirring of respect for the undoubted courage and consciousness of strength shown in this wild but single-handed crusade against wealth and power; rather, perhaps, it seemed to her to condone her own weakness in her youthful and inexplicable passion for him. No wonder she had submitted.

“Then you have nothing more to tell me?” she said after a pause, rising and going towards the mantel.

“You needn’t light up for me,” he returned, rising also. “I am going. Unless,” he added, with his coarse laugh, “you think it wouldn’t look well for Mrs. Horncastle to have been sitting in the dark with—a stranger!” He paused as she contemptuously put down the candlestick and threw the unlit match into the grate. “No, I’ve nothing more to tell. He’s a fancy-looking pup. You’d take him for twenty-one, though he’s only sixteen—clean-limbed and perfect—but for one thing”—He stopped. He met her quick look of interrogation, however, with a lowering silence that, nevertheless, changed again as he surveyed her erect figure by the faint light of the window with a sardonic smile. “He favors you, I think, and in all but one thing, too.”

“And that?” she queried coldly, as he seemed to hesitate.

“He ain’t ashamed of ME,” he returned, with a laugh.

The door closed behind him; she heard his heavy step descend the creaking stairs; he was gone. She went to the window and threw it open, as if to get rid of the atmosphere charged with his presence,—a presence still so potent that she now knew that for the last five minutes she had been, to her horror, struggling against its magnetism. She even recoiled now at the thought of her child, as if, in these new confidences over it, it had revived the old intimacy in this link of their common flesh. She looked down from her window on the square shoulders, thick throat, and crisp matted hair of her husband as he vanished in the darkness, and drew a breath of freedom,—a freedom not so much from him as from her own weakness that he was bearing away with him into the exonerating night.

She shut the window and sank down in her chair again, but in the encompassing and compassionate obscurity of the room. And this was the man she had loved and for whom she had wrecked her young life! Or WAS it love? and, if NOT, how was she better than he? Worse; for he was more loyal to that passion that had brought them together and its responsibilities than she was. She had suffered the perils and pangs of maternity, and yet had only the mere animal yearning for her offspring, while he had taken over the toil and duty, and even the devotion, of parentage himself. But then she remembered also how he had fascinated her—a simple schoolgirl—by his sheer domineering strength, and how the objections of her parents to this coarse and common man had forced her into a clandestine intimacy that ended in her complete subjection to him. She remembered the birth of an infant whose concealment from her parents and friends was compassed by his low cunning; she remembered the late atonement of marriage preferred by the man she had already begun to loathe and fear, and who she now believed was eager only for her inheritance. She remembered her abject compliance through the greater fear of the world, the stormy scenes that followed their ill-omened union, her final abandonment of her husband, and the efforts of her friends and family who had rescued the last of her property from him. She was glad she remembered it; she dwelt upon it, upon his cruelty, his coarseness and vulgarity, until she saw, as she honestly believed, the hidden springs of his affection for their child. It was HIS child in nature, however it might have favored her in looks; it was HIS own brutal SELF he was worshiping in his brutal progeny. How else could it have ignored HER—its own mother? She never doubted the truth of what he had told her—she had seen it in his own triumphant eyes. And yet she would have made a kind mother; she remembered with a smile and a slight rising of color the affection of Barker’s baby for her; she remembered with a deepening of that color the thrill of satisfaction she had felt in her husband’s fulmination against Mrs. Barker, and, more than all, she felt in his blind and foolish hatred of Barker himself a delicious condonation of the strange feeling that had sprung up in her heart for Barker’s simple, straightforward nature. How could HE understand, how could THEY understand (by the plural she meant Mrs. Barker and Horncastle), a character so innately noble. In her strange attraction towards him she had felt a charming sense of what she believed was a superior and even matronly protection; in the utter isolation of her life now—and with her husband’s foolish abuse of him ringing in her ears—it seemed a sacred duty. She had lost a son. Providence had sent her an ideal friend to replace him. And this was quite consistent, too, with a faint smile that began to play about her mouth as she recalled some instances of Barker’s delightful and irresistible youthfulness.

There was a clatter of hoofs and the sound of many voices from the street. Mrs. Horncastle knew it was the down coach changing horses; it would be off again in a few moments, and, no doubt, bearing her husband away with it. A new feeling of relief came over her as she at last heard the warning “All aboard!” and the great vehicle clattered and rolled into the darkness, trailing its burning lights across her walls and ceiling. But now she heard steps on the staircase, a pause before her room, a whisper of voices, the opening of the door, the rustle of a skirt, and a little feminine cry of protest as a man apparently tried to follow the figure into the room. “No, no! I tell you NO!” remonstrated the woman’s voice in a hurried whisper. “It won’t do. Everybody knows me here. You must not come in now. You must wait to be announced by the servant. Hush! Go!”

There was a slight struggle, the sound of a kiss, and the woman succeeded in finally shutting the door. Then she walked slowly, but with a certain familiarity towards the mantel, struck a match and lit the candle. The light shone upon the bright eyes and slightly flushed face of Mrs. Barker. But the motionless woman in the chair had recognized her voice and the voice of her companion at once. And then their eyes met.

Mrs. Barker drew back, but did not utter a cry. Mrs. Horncastle, with eyes even brighter than her companion’s, smiled. The red deepened in Mrs. Barker’s cheek.