As they were returning to the office they met the young driver of the mule-train, and Viola introduced him as "Mr. Ward, of Boston."
He was tall and spare, with a fine, sensitive, boyish face--a face of refinement which his rough, gray shirt, faded leggings, and badly battered hat belied.
"Mr. Ward is out here for his health, also," Viola explained. "All the really nice people are 'one-lungers.'"
"Isn't it sad?" said Ward, gravely. "However, Miss Lambert is only partly right. I made my health an excuse. I'm here because I like it."
Serviss bent a keen look upon him. "You don't look as if you had ever been sick."
"I'm not. I came out here to escape college--and my father's business." He laughed. "But don't betray me. I'm supposed to be 'slowly improving.'"
There was something fine and hawklike in the young fellow's profile as he stood negligently leaning on the door-frame, his eyes on the flushed face of the girl; and Serviss experienced another pang of jealous pain--they were so young, so comely, so full of the fire and imagination of youth. At the moment his own fame and special tasks were of small account.
Upon their return to the office Lambert met them in the same absent-minded, apologetic way. "I'm just getting some new machinery into place and haven't a minute, but you must make yourself as much at home as you can. Viola will show you around."
Serviss protested that he needed no entertainment, that he was not tired, and that he was well content to sit in the door and smoke and watch the changing glory of the peaks, and this he did while Viola moved about among the workmen in earnest conversation with her step-father.
"She is explaining me," Serviss reasoned. "I wish I could hear what she says. It would be amusing to know myself as she sees me. I hope she doesn't think me middle-aged as well as wise."
Lambert listened to his daughter's words with attention, for a professor in a college was an exalted person in his eyes, and one of his chief regrets at the moment was that he was unable to say to Serviss, "I am a college man myself"; but this he could not do for the reason that the death of his father had taken him out of his class at the beginning of his third year, and put him at the head of a large family as its breadwinner.
"He looks like a very young man, almost a boy--too young to be a professor; but then"--here his eyes twinkled--"when I was at Jefferson all professors seemed old to me. What's he doing here?"