A Meeting and a Clashing


As they stepped from the cage at the surface Percival became aware of a
group of strangers between him and the open door of the
shaft-house,--people displaying in dress and manner the unmistakable
stamp of New York. For part of a minute, while the pupils of his eyes
were contracting to the light, he saw them but vaguely. Then, as his
sight cleared, he beheld foremost in the group, beaming upon him with
an expression of pleased and surprised recognition, the girl whose face
and voice had for nearly half a year peopled his lover's solitude with
fair visions and made its silence to be all melody.

Had the encounter been anticipated his composure would perhaps have
failed him. Not a few of his waking dreams had sketched this, their
second meeting, and any one of the ways it had pleased him to plan it
would assuredly have found him nervously embarrassed. But so wildly
improbable was this reality that not the daringest of his imagined
happenings had approached it. His thoughts for the moment had been not
of her; then, all at once, she stood before him in the flesh, and he
was cool, almost unmoved. He suspected at once that her father was the
trim, fastidiously dressed man who looked as if he had been abducted
from a morning stroll down the avenue to his club; that the plump,
ruddy, high-bred woman, surveying the West disapprovingly through a
lorgnon, would be her mother. Shepler he knew by sight, with his big
head, massive shoulders, and curiously short, tapering body. Some other
men and a woman were scanning the hoisting machinery with superior
looks.