"
Now all the influences of this red-letter day had been humanizing, and
when Evan Blount remembered the preservation of the old "Circle-Bar"
ranch-house, and the motive which had prompted it, he told his brief
love-tale, hiding nothing--not even the hope that in the years to come
Patricia might possibly find her career sufficiently unsatisfying to
admit the thin edge of some wedge of reconsideration. He felt better
after he had told his father. It was highly necessary that he should
tell some one; and who better?
David Blount listened with the far-away look in his eyes which the son
had more than once marked as the greatest of the changes chargeable to
the aging years.
"Think a heap of her, do you, son?" he said, when the ambling
saddle-animals had covered another half-mile of the homeward journey.
"So much that it went near to spoiling me when she finally made me
realize that I couldn't hold my own against the 'career,'" was the young
man's answer. Then he added: "I want work, father--that is what I am out
here for; the hardest kind of work, and plenty of it; something that I
can put my heart into. Can you find it for me?"
There was the wisdom of the centuries in the gentle smile provoked by
this unashamed disappointed lover's appeal.
"I wouldn't take it too hard--the career business--if I were you, son,"
said the wise man.
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