“Really, Tom?  Have you gone into business for yourself?  I thought you had another year at Boston.”

“I have another year coming to me, but I don’t know when I shall get it.  And I am in business for myself; though perhaps I should be modest and call it a firm—­Gordon and Gordon.”

“What does the firm do?”

“A number of things; among others, it buys the entire iron output of the Chiawassee Consolidated, just at present.”

“Dear me!” she said; “how fine and large that sounds!  If I should say anything like that you would tell me that Brag was a good dog, but—­”

He grinned ecstatically.  It was so like old times—­the good old times—­to be bandying good-tempered abuse with her.

“I do brag a lot, don’t I?  But have you ever noticed that I ’most always have something to brag about?  This time, for instance.  I built this new firm, and it is all that has kept Chiawassee from going into the sheriff’s hands any time during the past six months.”

Longfellow had picked his way judiciously around the obstructions and through the gap in the boundary hills, and was jogging in a vertical trot up the valley pike made clean and hard and stony-white by the sweeping and hammering of the autumn rains.  The mingled clamor of the industries was left behind, but the throbbing pulsations of the big blowing-engines hung in the air like the sighings of an imprisoned giant.  They were passing the miniature copy of Morwenstow Church when Ardea spoke again.

“You have been home all summer?” she asked.

“At home and on the road, trying to hypnotize somebody into buying something—­anything—­made out of cast-iron.  Ah, girl! it’s been a bitter fight!”

She was instantly sympathetic; more, there was a little thrill of vicarious triumph to go with the sympathy.  She was sure he had won, or was winning, the battle.

“We read something about the hard times in the American papers,” she said.  “You don’t know how far away anything like that seems when there is an ocean between.  And I was hoping all the time that our homeland down here was escaping.”

“Escaping?  You came through South Tredegar a little while ago; it is dead—­too dead to bury.  You hear the sob of those blowing-engines?—­you will travel two hundred miles in the iron belt before you will hear it again.  When I came home in June we were smashed, like all the other furnaces in the South—­only worse.”

“How worse, Tom?”

He forgot the tacit truce for the moment.

“Duxbury Farley and his son had deliberately wrecked the company.”

She laid a restraining hand on his arm.

“Let us understand each other,” she said gently.  “You must not say such things of Mr. Farley and—­and his son to me.  If you do, I can’t listen.”

“You don’t believe what I say?”

“I believe you have convinced yourself.  But you are vindictive; you know you are.  And I mean to be fair and just.”