“How enthusiastic you are!” she commented.  “I don’t believe I should be equal to ‘a hundred times, first and last,’ or to the snow-shoes.  But I can admire such zeal in other people immensely.”

“Do you really think so small of a man’s work in the world, Miss Adair?” he demanded, not very coherently.  “I’m not saying that the scenery doesn’t move me.  It does; and the first time I stood here on this summit, I presume I felt just as you do now.  But my comings and goings have been chiefly concerned with this”—­kicking the rail of the new track which threaded the shallow valley of the pass.  “I am trying to build a railroad; to build it quickly, and as well as I can.  When I get it finished, I may have time to admire the scenery.”

It was a little appeal for sympathy, apparent enough in spite of its indirectness; but Miss Adair was still mindful of Ford’s too evident willingness to leave her behind at the deserted grading-camp half-way down to Saint’s Rest where the Nadia was temporarily side-tracked.

“Another ideal gone,” she lamented, in mock despair.  “All those trampings and toilings up this magnificent mountain merely to prepare for the laying of some logs of wood in a row, with two strands of iron to fasten them together!”

He smiled at her definition of his railroad, and the keen edge of his annoyance was a little blunted.  He had been telling himself that she might be twenty-four, or possibly twenty-five; but evidently she was only a child, with a child’s appreciation of a very considerable industrial triumph.  Old engineers, one of them an assistant on his own staff, had shaken their heads and declared that the running of a standard gauge railroad over Plug Pass was a sheer impossibility.  Yet he had done it.

“I suspect I owe you an apology,” he said, yielding a little to the love which was fighting with discouragement and righteous anger for the first place in his heart.  “I’m afraid I have been taking you too seriously, all along.”

Her laugh was a delicious little ripple of exultation.  She had succeeded in avenging herself.

“I can forgive you now,” she said, and the blue eyes were dancing.  “But you must admit that you were the aggressor.  I have never been made so pointedly unwelcome in all my life.  I believe you were going to refuse to let me walk up here with you if Uncle Sidney had not commanded you to.”

This time his smile was a grin, but it was not ill-natured.

“I should, indeed,” he confessed quite frankly.  “To be brutally candid, I had a decided attack of the ‘unwelcomes’ when I received Mr. Colbrith’s wire announcing his intention of bringing his picnic party out here into the midst of things.  We have little time, and none of the civilized conveniences, for entertaining company.”

“I think we all understand that,” she made haste to say.  “Aunt Hetty tried to dissuade Uncle Sidney, but he was bent on showing us how modern railroad building is rushed at the ’front’—­is that the right word?—­and so here we are.”