“Oh, I’m so glad to be here,” Jack had begun, “and it was so good of you to want me,” when a voice rang clear from the top of the stairs: 

“And where’s daddy—­isn’t he coming?”

“Oh!—­how do you do, Miss Ruth?  No; I am sorry to say he could not leave—­that is, we could not persuade him to leave.  He sent you all manner of messages, and you, too, Miss—­”

“He isn’t coming?  Oh, I am so disappointed!  What is the matter, is he ill?” She was half-way down the staircase now, her face showing how keen was her disappointment.

“No—­nothing’s the matter—­only we are arranging for an important blast in a day or two, and he felt he couldn’t be away.  I can only stay the night.”  Jack had his overcoat stripped from his broad shoulders now and the two had reached each other’s hands.

Miss Felicia watched them narrowly out of her sharp, kindly eyes.  This love-affair—­if it were a love-affair—­had been going on for years now and she was still in the dark as to the outcome.  There was no question that the boy was head over heels in love with the girl—­she could see that from the way the color mounted to his cheeks when Ruth’s voice rang out, and the joy in his eyes when they looked into hers.  How Ruth felt toward her new guest was what she wanted to know.  This was, perhaps, the only reason why she had invited him—­another thing she kept strictly to herself.

But the two understood it—­if Miss Felicia did not.  There may be shrewd old ladies who can read minds at a glance, and fussy old men who can see through blind millstones, and who know it all, but give me two lovers to fool them both to the top of their bent, be they so minded.

“And now, dear, let Mr. Breen go to his room, for we dine in an hour, and Holker will be cross as two sticks if we keep it waiting a minute.”

But Holker was not cross—­not when dinner was served; nobody was cross—­certainly not Peter, who was in his gayest mood; and certainly not Ruth or Jack, who babbled away next to each other.  Peter’s heart swelled with pride and satisfaction as he saw the change which two years of hard work had made in Jack—­not only in his bearing and in a certain fearless independence which had become a part of his personality, but in the unmistakable note of joyousness which flowed out of him, so marked in contrast to the depression which used to haunt him like a spectre.  Stories of his life at his boarding-house—­vaguely christened a hotel by its landlady, Mrs. Hicks—­bubbled out of the boy as well as accounts of various escapades among the men he worked with—­especially the younger engineers and one of the foremen who had rooms next his own—­all told with a gusto and ring that kept the table in shouts of merriment—­Morris laughing loudest and longest, Peter whispering behind his hand to Miss Felicia: 

“Charming, isn’t he?—­and please note, my dear, that none of the dirt from his shovel seems to have clogged his wit—­” at which there was another merry laugh—­Peter’s, this time, his being the only voice in evidence.