He would see: if the
good to be accomplished were great enough to over-balance the evil ...
it was a temptation to compromise--a sharp temptation; and he found
himself longing for Patricia, for her clear-sighted comment which, he
felt sure, would go straight to the heart of the tangle.
It was that thought of Patricia, and his need for her, that made him
absent-minded at the Wartrace Hall dinner-table that evening; and the
father, looking on, suspected that Evan's taciturnity was an expression
of his prejudice against the woman who had taken his mother's place.
After dinner, when the son, pleading weariness, retreated early to his
room, the senator's suspicion became a belief.
"You'll have to be right patient with the boy, little woman," he said to
the small person whom Gantry had described as the court of last resort;
this when Evan had disappeared and the long-stemmed pipe was alight. "I
shouldn't wonder if Boston had put some mighty queer notions into his
head."
The little lady looked up from her embroidery frame and a quaint smile
was twitching at the corners of the pretty mouth. "He is a dear boy, and
he is trying awfully hard to hate me," she said. "But I sha'n't let him,
David."
VI
ON THE WING OF OCCASIONS
From the time when it was heralded in the mammoth New Year's edition of
_The Plainsman_ as "the newest, the finest, and the most luxurious
hostelry west of the Missouri River," the Inter-Mountain Hotel, in the
Sage-brush capital, had been the acceptable gathering-place of the
clans, industrial, promoting, or political.
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