The young man with the fighting determination in the back part of his brain bided his time.  He was willing enough to listen to Grieg and Brahms as they were interpreted by Patricia, but the greater matter was still outweighing the lesser.  Further along, when Miss Anners had played herself out, Blount tried to break the obstructing combination.  But, in spite of his efforts, the talk drifted back to the dinosaurs and the pterodactyls, and when he finally went away to smoke, he did it alone.

The Wartrace Hall den was an annex to the living-room, and through the bamboo portieres he could hear the animated hum of the prehistoric discussion, in which Patricia had now joined as a loyal daughter should.  Hoping against hope that the professor would some time go to bed, and that his father would come to the den for his bedtime whiff at the long-stemmed pipe, Blount smoked and waited.  But when his patience was finally rewarded, it was not the Honorable Senator who drew the bamboo portieres aside and entered the cosey smoking-room.  It was Patricia, and she was alone.

“I thought perhaps I should find you here,” she said, taking the easy chair at the opposite corner of the fireplace where a tiny wood fire was blazing in deference to the chill of the approaching autumn.  “Did we bore you to death with the Pliocenes?”

“Not quite,” he admitted grudgingly.  “But since I hadn’t remembered to have myself born six or seven million years ago, I can’t somehow seem to galvanize a very active interest in the dead-and-gone periods.”

“Nor I,” she confessed frankly, “though for daddy’s sake I do try to.  But for us who are living to-day there are so many problems of critically vital importance—­problems that the pterodactyls never knew anything about.”

“I know,” returned the young man, half-absently.  “I am up against one of them, right now, and I don’t know how to solve it.”

“Will it bear telling?” she asked, and he hoped that the sympathy in her tone was personal rather than conventional.

“It will not only bear telling; it demands to be told to some one whose sense of right and wrong has not been drawn and quartered and flayed alive until it has no longer life or breath left with which to protest,” and thereupon he told her circumstantially all that had befallen him since the eventful evening on which he had forsaken the wrecked train at Twin Buttes, concluding with the story of the lumber magnate’s attempt at corruption, of which he suppressed nothing but the fact that her father’s name appeared in Mr. Hathaway’s list of share-holders.  When he had made an end, her eyes were shining, though whether with quickened sympathy or indignation he could not determine.

“What did you do?” she asked, referring to the incident of the afternoon.

“I didn’t do half enough!” he fumed.  “I’m afraid I let Hathaway escape without being told plainly enough what a hopelessly irreclaimable scoundrel he is.  When he edged out of the door, he was still telling me to take my time to think it over, and was indicating the way in which I might communicate my consent without committing anybody.  I made a mistake in not firing him bodily!”