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Updated: June 27, 2025
Runyon rode out past Harboro's house that afternoon. Sylvia, in her place by the window, watched him come. In the distance he assumed a new aspect in her eyes. She thought of him impersonally as a thrilling picture. She rejoiced in the sight of him as one may in the spectacle of an army marching with banners and music.
He began at the beginning again. The whole thing had been an error. Sylvia had been rendered no services at all. Runyon had engaged a horse for his own use, and the bill had simply been sent to the wrong place. That was the rational explanation. It was a clear and sufficient explanation. Harboro held his head high, as if his problem had been solved.
Joy seemed to them a kind of intoxication as if it were not to be indulged in save at long intervals. "I didn't overtax myself," replied Sylvia. "The ending of things is never very cheerful. I suppose that's what I feel just now as if, at the end, things don't seem quite worth while, after all." Harboro held to his point. "You are tired," he insisted. Runyon interposed cheerfully.
She had drunk of the cup which had been offered her, and she must not rebel because a bitter sediment lay on her lips. She had always faintly realized that the hours she spent with Runyon might some day have to be paid for in loneliness and despair.
But Runyon was thinking how rare a thing it is for a man and a woman to be quite alone in the world; how the walls of houses listen, and windows are as eyes which look in as well as out; how highways forever hold their malicious gossips to note the movements of every pair who do not walk sedately; how you may mount the stairway of a strange house and encounter one who knows you at the top, and who laughs in his sleeve; how you may emerge from the house in which you have felt safe from espionage only to encounter a familiar talebearer at the door.
Then above the heads of the crowd she saw it a scuffed circlet of earth measuring exactly fifty-two feet across and marking the location where the middle ring had been builded when Runyon & Bulger's Mighty United Railroad Shows pitched their tents on the occasion of their annual Spring engagement.
The monstrous inadequacy of it was too much for him. He had tricked her, certainly, and that wasn't a manly thing to do. He seemed to be trying to get his faculties adjusted. Yet the words he uttered finally were pathetically irrelevant, it would have seemed. He addressed Runyon. "Are you the sort of man who would talk about about this sort of thing?" he asked.
He had never cared particularly for the Turners; was perfectly willing to keep the friendship within bounds. He sympathized as little with another friendship she made, some months later, with the wife of a young engineer who had recently come to the mine. Pauline Runyon was a few years older than her husband, a handsome, thin, intense woman, who did everything in an entirely individual way.
For the occasion he was dressed in a suit of fawn-colored corduroy which fitted him as the rind fits the apple. "Just a little too much so," Harboro was thinking, ambiguously enough, certainly, as Runyon was brought before him and Sylvia. Runyon acknowledged the introduction with a cheerful urbanity which was quite without discrimination as between Harboro and Sylvia.
The first of these was made by certain cronies of the town who found their beer flat if there was not a bit of gossip to go with it, and it was to the effect that the affair between Sylvia and Runyon was sure to end disastrously if it did not immediately end otherwise.
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