Page:The Fruit of the Tree (Wharton 1907).djvu/91

Rh box at his elbow. “Let me offer you one, Mr. Amherst: we shall talk more comfortably,” he suggested with distant affability; but Amherst, with a gesture of refusal, plunged into his exposition of the Dillon case. He tried to put the facts succinctly, presenting them in their bare ugliness, without emotional drapery; setting forth Dillon’s good record for sobriety and skill, dwelling on the fact that his wife’s ill—health was the result of perfectly remediable conditions in the work—rooms, and giving his reasons for the belief that the accident had been caused, not by Dillon’s carelessness, but by the over-crowding of the carding-room. Mr. Tredegar listened attentively, though the cloud of cigar-smoke between himself and Amherst masked from the latter his possible changes of expression. When he removed his cigar, his face looked smaller than ever, as though desiccated by the fumes of the tobacco.

“Have you ever called Mr. Gaines’s attention to these matters?”

“No: that would have been useless. He has always refused to discuss the condition of the mills with any one but the manager.”

“H’m—that would seem to prove that Mr. Gaines, who lives here, sees as much reason for trusting Truscomb’s judgment as Mr. Westmore, who delegated his authority from a distance.”

Amherst did not take this up, and after a pause Mr. [ 79 ]