“That’s why I wish Paul had been a preacher or something like that,” she confided to Joanne as they drove homeward.  “I’m growing old just thinking of him working over that horrid dynamite and powder all the time.  Every little while some one is blown into nothing.”

“I believe,” said Joanne, “that I’d like to do something like that if I were a man.  I’d want to be a man, not that preachers aren’t men, Peggy, dear—­but I’d want to do things, like blowing up mountains for instance, or finding buried cities, or”—­she whispered, very, very softly under her breath—­“writing books, John Aldous!”

Only Aldous heard those last words, and Joanne gave a sharp little cry; and when Peggy asked her what the matter was Joanne did not tell her that John Aldous had almost broken her hand on the opposite side—­for Joanne was riding between the two.

“It’s lame for life,” she said to him half an hour later, when he was bidding her good-bye, preparatory to accompanying Blackton down to the working steel.  “And I deserve it for trying to be kind to you.  I think some writers of books are—­are perfectly intolerable!”

“Won’t you take a little walk with me right after dinner?” he was asking for the twentieth time.

“I doubt it very, very much.”

“Please, Ladygray!”

“I may possibly think about it.”

With that she left him, and she did not look back as she and Peggy Blackton went into the house.  But as they drove away they saw two faces at the window that overlooked the townward road, and two hands were waving good-bye.  Both could not be Peggy Blackton’s hands.

“Joanne and I are going for a walk this afternoon, Blackton,” said Aldous, “and I just want to tell you not to worry if we’re not back by four o’clock.  Don’t wait for us.  We may be watching the blow-up from the top of some mountain.”

Blackton chuckled.

“Don’t blame you,” he said.  “From an observer’s point of view, John, it looks to me as though you were going to have something more than hope to live on pretty soon!”

“I—­I hope so.”

“And when I was going with Peggy I wouldn’t have traded a quiet little walk with her—­like this you’re suggesting—­for a front seat look at a blow-up of the whole Rocky Mountain system!”

“And you won’t forget to tell Mrs. Blackton that we may not return by four o’clock?”

“I will not.  And”—­Blackton puffed hard at his pipe—­“and, John—­the Tete Jaune preacher is our nearest neighbour,” he finished.

From then until dinner time John Aldous lived in an atmosphere that was not quite real, but a little like a dream.  His hopes and his happiness were at their highest.  He knew that Joanne would go walking with him that afternoon, and in spite of his most serious efforts to argue to the contrary he could not keep down the feeling that the event would mean a great deal for him.  Almost feverishly he interested himself in Paul Blackton’s work.  When they returned to the bungalow, a little before noon, he went to his room, shaved himself, and in other ways prepared for dinner.