Page:Hard-pan; a story of bonanza fortunes (IA hardpanbonanza00bonnrich).pdf/230

218 the plaza. She wanted to run, to find the old man and, taking his head in her arms, whisper her contrition. Through street after street her swift footfall woke sharp, decisive echoes. Her face had lost its look of dejection and was set in lines of firmness and resolution. People, as she passed, turned to look at her—at the young face so full of a steady purpose, at the eyes deep with a woman's aspirations. Her thoughts flew forward, high-strung, exalted, beating against the confining limits of time and space. She would take him back to San Francisco. They would go together. How had she had the heart to hurt him so! Now, all blindness swept away by the breaking down of her egotism, she knew what he had suffered.

It was almost dark when she reached the house, and as she went up the path from the gate she saw lights springing out here and there in the upper windows. In the passage to her own room she came upon Mrs. Seymour lighting the gas, her back toward the stair-head. The elder woman, hearing the girl's light step, turned with the match in her hand. Viola, still engrossed in her own thoughts, mechanically smiled a greeting. Mrs. Seymour's face, with the crude gaslight falling on it, was unresponsively grave.

"I 'm glad that 's you," she said; "I 've had a sort of scare about your father."