The man looked at her with a bewildered expression for a moment or two.  Then he laughed.  “No,” he said, “I find it wonderfully nice.”

There was an underlying sincerity in his voice, and Alice Deringham driven by curiosity went a step farther.

“The coffee?” she said.

She was almost sorry next moment, for she had at other times called up considerably more than she had expected or desired from the unsounded depths of the man’s nature.  For a second or two there was a great wistfulness, which changed into a little glow she shrank from, in his eyes.  He turned them upon her, and then away, and they were once more grave when he looked back again.  Still, she guessed what that effort had cost him.

“No,” he said quietly.  “I did not mean the coffee.  You see, I had never until you came here been used to anything smooth or pretty.”

Alice Deringham smiled a little, for she understood.  The man, she thought, was willing she should accept the somewhat pointless compliment as the sequence of his former speech, to cover his mistake if he had betrayed more than he thought desirable.  It also increased her liking for him, since it appeared that Alton was capable of self-restraint.  There was, however, no mistaking what she had seen, and the girl remembered that one of the Winnipeg ladies she travelled with, who had visited one of the weird valleys across the American frontier, described to her the fascination of throwing stones into the basin of a geyser to see how many it would take before it erupted.  During her intercourse with rancher Alton, Alice Deringham had experienced the sensation.

“You have been working too hard lately, and worrying, too, I think,” she said.

Alton laughed a little, and then glanced at the stove for a while in silence, as though communing with himself.  When he looked up again the girl fancied that he had decided something.  “Work hurts nobody.  It’s the worry that leaves the mark,” he said, with a smile.  “Of course, a good many people will have told you that before.  Yes, I’ve been thinking a good deal lately.”

“It is occasionally a solace to tell one’s friends one’s thoughts,” said Miss Deringham.

“Well,” said Alton gravely, “there’s a thing I feel I should do, and yet I don’t want to, because it would stand in the way of my doing something else.”

“That is a somewhat common difficulty,” said Alice Deringham.  “It depends upon the importance to yourself, or others, of the first thing.”

Alton nodded.  “There are,” he said, “men in this district who have worked very hard, not for the bare living the ranch gives them, because some have put a good deal more into the land than they have taken out of it, but for what it will give them presently.  Now, unless somebody does the right thing for them, another man will walk right in and take all they have worked for away.  I wouldn’t like that to happen, because I am one of them, you see.”