Her pathetic sweetness moved him. Then he flamed with determination.
He would take the burden on himself--would face her father at once, but
she hushed him in real alarm and said, that battle she must fight
unaided; it was after all only a little one, she whispered, after the
one she had fought with herself. But he knew she glossed over her
anxiety, for when he withdrew her eyes looked tears though they shed
none.
In the morning there were two vacancies at the breakfast table; neither
Gertrude nor her father appeared. When Glover returned to the hotel at
five o'clock the first person he saw was Mrs. Whitney. She and Marie,
with the doctor and Allen Harrison, had arrived on the first train out
of the Springs in four days, and Mrs. Whitney's greeting of Glover in
the office was disconcerting. It scarcely needed Gertrude's face at
dinner, as she tried to brave the storm that had set in, or her
reluctant admission when she saw him as she passed up to her room that
she and her father had been up nearly the whole of the night before, to
complete his depression.
Every effort he made during the evening to speak to Gertrude was balked
by some untoward circumstance, but about nine o'clock they met on the
parlor floor and Glover led her to the elevator, which was being run
that night by Solomon Battershawl. Solomon lifted them to the top
floor and made busy at the end of the hall while they had five short
minutes. When they descended he knew what she was facing. Even Marie,
the one friend he thought he had in the family, had taken a stand
against them, and her father was deaf to every appeal.
They parted, depressed, with only a hand pressure, a look and a whisper
of constancy. At midnight, as Glover lay thinking, a crew caller
rapped at his door. He brought a message and held his electric
pocket-lamp near, while Glover, without getting up, read the telegram.
It was from Bucks asking if he could take a rotary at once into the
Heart Mountains.
Glover knew snow had been falling steadily on the main line for two
days. East of the middle range it was nothing but extreme cold, west
it had been one long storm. Morris Blood was at Goose River. The
message was not an order; but on the division there was no one else
available at the moment that could handle safely such a battery of
engines as would be needed to bore the drifts west of the sheds.
Moreover, Glover knew how Bucks had chafed under the conditions that
kept the directors on his hands. They were impatient to get to the
coast, and the general manager was anxious to be rid of them as soon as
there should be some certainty of getting them safely over the
mountains.