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“Do-a I eentrude?” he asked, with an Italian accent and an Italian bearing. “I suppose no, eh? Thece ees a placa beesness.”

Mary’s small departure from a business-like perfunctory manner ended at once. She took the scrap of paper which Ravelli laid on her desk, and without a word translated its writing into telegraphic clicks. Ravelli was a sub-contractor, and this was one of his frequent communications with officials at the company’s city office. The response was likely to be immediate, and he waited for it.

“To get the full value of this view,” Gerald Heath resumed, and now he addressed himself to Mary directly, as though with almost a purpose of ignoring Ravelli, to whose greeting he had barely responded, “you need to come upon it suddenly–as I once did. We had been for months blasting and digging through the mountain. Every day’s duty in that hole was like a spell of imprisonment in a dark, damp dungeon. And your men, Ravelli, looked like a chain-gang of convicts.”

“You woulda no dare say so mooch to their-a fa-ces,” Ravelli retorted, with an insolence that was unmistakably intentional.

“O, I didn’t mean a reflection on them,” said Gerald, disregarding the other’s quarrelsome aggressiveness. “We all look rascally in the mud, drip, and grime of tunnel work. And your gang of swarthy Italians are bound to have a demoniac aspect underground.”

It was more careless than intentional that Gerald thus provoked Ravelli. There had been dislike between them, growing out of friction between their respective duties as a civil engineer and a sub-contractor, for the former was necessarily a critic of the latter’s work. But they had never quarreled, and Gerald saw nothing in this occasion, as Ravelli seemed to, for any outbreak of temper.

“Bettare be civ-vil with-a your tongue,” Ravelli sneered.

“Well, I think so, too, as we are with a lady.”

“Zat ees why-a I inseest you treat-a me as one gentleman.”

So it seemed that he was especially regardful of how he figured in the presence of Mary Warriner.

“Like one gentleman? Oh, I will treat you like two gentlemen–so politely;” and Gerald began to again nonchalantly whittle the birchen pole. “I was going to tell how, when at last we broke through the rock at this end of the tunnel, I happened to be right there. A blast tore out an aperture several feet wide. We saw daylight through the smoke. We rushed pell-mell over the broken stone, and struggled with one another to get through first. It was–why, it was you, Ravelli, wasn’t it?–whom I tussled with. Yes, we got into the breach together. You tried to push me back. You couldn’t–of course, you couldn’t;” and the narrator’s reference to his own superior strength was exasperatingly accompanied by a glance not free from contempt.

“Eet was-a all een fun,” Ravelli smilingly explained to Mary, and then his eyes turned darkly upon Gerald: “Eef eet had-a been one ear-nest fight—-,” the different result was vaguely indicated by a hard clinch of fists and a vicious crunch of teeth.

It was beyond a doubt that Ravelli could not bear to be belittled to Mary; but she and Gerald were alike inattentive to his exhibition of wrath.

“No prisoner was ever more exultant to escape,” Heath went on, “than I was to get out of that dark, noisome hole into clean sunlight. I ran to this very spot, and–well, the landscape was on view, just as it is now. It was like getting from gloom out into glory.”

The young man’s exuberant words were not spoken with much enthusiasm, and yet they had sufficient earnestness to prove their sincerity. He had stopped whittling, and his knife lay on the desk, as he turned his back against the sapling and rested both elbows on it.

“So I’ve been writing to the president of the company, urging him to deflect the route a trifle, so that passengers might come out of the tunnel to see a landscape worth a thousand miles of special travel, and to be had by going less than as many feet. This is the very latest day for changing the survey. To-morrow will be too late. That is why I’m telegraphing so urgently.”