"
Her earnestness was so unconsciously wistful that Steve could not help
but smile at it a little, even though he had been telling himself,
since the moment of her coming, that he must not let himself dwell just
then upon that wistfulness which, for many hours, had been most
apparent to him.
"I've felt that way about it often," he answered, almost dully. "I
like it better myself, as it is. It does appear to be a long way
ahead, doesn't it--that day of completion which you cover in the
screech of the whistles? Only to-day, when we were scrambling about
down there in the alders, it took nearly all the imagination I
possessed to see two streaks of steel where there is nothing but
thicket now. But as for the bigness of it"--he laughed
deprecatingly--"it isn't so very big, you know. It's just a--a mean
sort of proposition."
Barbara leaned forward, delicate chin resting upon interlocked fingers.
She was not quite certain whether she had caught a thread of weariness
in those words.
"To me," she said, "to me it is colossal! Why, I thought the work at
Morrison seemed complicated and tangled enough, but there--there isn't
even a beginning or an ending here. There's nothing but woods and
water."
She pointed out across the valley toward a mound-like outline yellow
under the moon; pointed into the north and asked another question.
"Is that part of the embankment?" she wanted to know.
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