PART II

I

Two weeks later Ora and Ida sailed from Havre. Gregory had cabled, and the _Herald_ had published a dramatic account, of the wounding of Mr. Mark Blake in the tunnel of his wife’s mine. The engineers’ lease had expired and he had closed down the mine temporarily. The sinking of the inclined shaft in the “Apex” had proceeded very slowly owing to the uncommon hardness of the rock; it would seem that Nature herself had taken a hand in the great fight and enlisted for once on the side of the weaker power. Although when Osborne and Douglas had turned over the mine, their cross-cut almost had reached the point on the vein which the new shaft expected to strike, Gregory had risen twice in the night and walked along the hill beyond his boundary, reasonably sure that all the blasting was not in the shaft, his keen ear detecting muffled reverberations slightly to the east and at a greater depth. He communicated his suspicions to Mark, and on the following night they examined the lock on the Primo shaft house and discovered that it had been tampered with. They went down by way of the ladder; and in the cross-cut on the chalcopyrite vein they found miners working with hand drills. There was a desperate hand-to-hand fight with the manager and shift boss; the miners, who were bohunks, proceeding phlegmatically with their work.

The four men had wrestled out into the station at the foot of the shaft, where they had drawn their “guns”; each had been wounded, but only Mark seriously. He had received a ball in the lung and another in the leg. The night was bitterly cold and it was some time before Gregory and the two antagonists could get him to the surface. He had insisted upon being taken to a hospital in Butte; and, between loss of blood, shock, and pneumonia, his condition was precarious.

The girls, who had left Monte Carlo two days after Valdobia’s sudden departure, received the news in Paris, where they were replenishing their wardrobes. Ora, torn with remorse, and terrified with vague and tragic visions of the future, was in a distracted condition; but Ida, although she sincerely lamented the possible demise of her old friend, did not lose her head. She gave final and minute orders to tailors and dressmakers, instructed them to send the trousseaux in bond directly to Great Falls, Montana, devoted a morning to the selection of hats both for herself and her friend, and packed all the trunks. Mowbray, always willing to be useful, bought their tickets and escorted them to Havre. Ida thanked him with something like real warmth as they parted at the head of the gangplank, and promised him the “time of his life” when he came to Montana in the summer.

“Now, buck up,” she said, smiling into his disconsolate face; “you know I’m not flirting with you. We’re the best of pals. I’ll be glad to see you, all right, and perhaps I’ll find a nice little heiress for you.”

“Oh, don’t!” Mowbray tried to arrange his features for the benefit of the passersby. “You know I’m fond of you no end. Why----”

“Get along now. That’s the last whistle. Good-bye, and write me nice gossippy letters. It’s only a few months, anyhow.”

Mowbray walked down the gangplank with his head in the air, and, as he turned on the dock to lift his hat, Ida noticed that his face, whose charm was its boyish gayety, looked suddenly older, and almost as determined as Valdobia’s.

“Oh, Lord!” she thought, as she turned away, “men! They’re as alike as lead pencils in a box. But I guess I can manage him.”

Ora stayed in bed for two days; reaction left her physically exhausted and she slept most of the time. On the third day Ida peremptorily dressed her and took her on deck. A wireless from Gregory, announcing that Mark was holding his own, further revived her, and before they reached New York another wireless was still more reassuring. A few years before, when the ores of Butte Hill were roasted in the open and the poisonous fumes were often as thick as the worst of London fogs, pneumonia ran its course in twenty-four hours to the grave, but in these days the patient had a fighting chance despite the altitude. The Butte doctors were experts in pneumonia, so many of the careless miners were afflicted, and Mark not only had a sound constitution but never had been a heavy drinker. There was every reason to expect him to pull through, as Ida assured her friend whenever they were alone; but she managed to meet several agreeable people, and kept herself and Ora companioned by them throughout the voyage.

Valdobia was still in Rome; his mother was dying. He had written daily to Ora and she had read and reread his letters. They said neither too much nor too little; but he was one of life’s artists and he managed to pervade them with an atmosphere that was both sweet and disturbing. His telegram, when he had read the news of her husband’s misadventure in the newspapers, was a masterpiece. If he was unable to grieve over the possibility of Mr. Blake’s abrupt removal from a scene where he was the one superfluous actor, too well-bred to betray his relief, and too little of a hypocrite to be verbose in condolence, his attitude was so finely impersonal, and it was so obvious that he knew exactly how she felt, that Ora liked him more than ever if only for rousing her stricken sense of humour.

She had thrust his letters and telegrams into the depths of her steamer trunk, but after she had made up her mind that Mark would recover (her lively imagination picturing him hobbling among the orange groves of Southern California while she guided his footsteps and diverted his mind), she retrieved the correspondence and read it every night when alone in her stateroom. Valdobia’s devotion not only gave her courage, but his strong imposing personality stood with a haughty and confident menace between herself and Gregory Compton. She refused to think on her future, beyond the long convalescence of her husband, but had it not been for her meeting with Valdobia and her deliberate installment of his image on the throne of her adventurous imagination, she doubted if she would have had the courage to return to Montana. As it was there were moments when the poignant mental life she had led with Gregory Compton reached a long finger from the depths to which it had been consigned and sketched his image in her mind as vividly as if he stood before her; while her whole being ached with longing and despair. But her will was strong; she banished him summarily and reinstated the Roman who was so like and so unlike the man compounded of the old world and the new in the mortar of the Northwest.

Ida, with an unexpected delicacy, refrained from curiosity, and although she had too much tact to avoid all mention of Valdobia, only alluded to him casually. She left Europe out of the conversation as much as possible, and amused Ora, when they were alone, with the plans of her campaign in Butte. When they reached quarantine Ora was horrified to find herself surrounded by reporters. The Paris _Herald_ had published the story of her mine as well as her picture and Ida’s, but they hardly had been sensible of their notoriety until, on the steamer, they were among Americans once more. It was manifest that they were “big news” in their own country, and Ora fled to her stateroom, leaving Ida to face the reporters alone.

Ida was undaunted; moreover she was quick to seize her first opportunity to dazzle Butte. She made herself amiable and interesting to the young men, her natural cunning steering her mid-stream, in this her first interview: an ordeal in which most novices are wrecked on the tropic or the arctic shore. She thanked them as warmly for their news that Mr. Blake had left that morning with his doctors and nurses in a private car for Southern California, and expected his wife to go directly to Los Angeles, as if Ora had not received a wireless to that effect an hour before; she modestly told them something of her social experiences abroad, answered the inevitable questions regarding suffrage, excused Ora, “who was naturally upset”, and expatiated upon her happiness in returning to live in Butte. They thought this odd, but were so delighted with her mixture of dignity and naïveté that they rushed to their respective desks and told the world that the wife of Gregory Compton had been the guest of princes and was the handsomest woman in America.

Ora was almost gay at the prospect of going directly to California, although she was obliged to make the journey alone. It was early in the afternoon when they landed. Ida established Ora in the first Overland Limited that left the Grand Central Station, and returned to the Waldorf-Astoria, where she had engaged rooms for a month. She had no intention of returning to Butte ignorant of New York. Westerners of wealth, old and recent, visited New York casually several times a year; and not to know it, even with Europe to her credit, stamped a woman with the newness of the new-rich who wore all their jewels all the time. Ida had seen many women make fools of themselves and had no intention of leaving any penetrable spaces in her armour. She spent every morning in the shops, or in the establishments of the exclusive dressmakers, tailors and milliners that were patronized by the fashionable women of Butte and Helena, giving them liberal orders. She saw all the new plays, heard the more famous of the opera singers, and even attended three symphony concerts. She drove in the Park every afternoon or joined the throngs on Fifth Avenue; and she took tea or lunch in the different hotels and restaurants devoted to fashion. Sometimes she sat in the gangways of her own famous hostellerie, recalling with a tolerant smile her early crude ambitions--had they died less than a year ago?--to trail her feathers up and down Peacock Alley. She wore one of her severest tailored suits upon these occasions, and maintained an air of stately detachment that somewhat counteracted the always startling beauty of her face and figure. No man took his courage in his hand.

One afternoon she sat longer than usual, for she had set her teeth that day and walked through the Metropolitan Museum. She fell to musing, and with a more sustained introspection than was her habit, upon the changes that had taken place within herself during the past year; wondering “how deep they had struck”, if she really were as altered as she must appear even to the raking eye of Butte; or if she merely had developed her native characteristics while polishing her surface and furnishing her mind.

She also endeavoured to analyse her attitude toward returning to her husband, but gave this up, although puzzled that it was not more obvious. But her mind was clear on one point. If Gregory desired her society he must spend his week-ends in Butte; nothing would induce her to return to the De Smet ranch. She had not even a spasm of curiosity to see the famous Perch of the Devil Mine.

II

Ida was not given to imaginative excursions, but during the three days’ journey from New York to Butte, she made no acquaintances, resting in the seclusion of her drawing-room; and after she had read all the magazines her mind began to people itself. Although the ladies of Butte, whom she now regarded as equals, moved along the central highway, Gregory was always turning the corners, and she visualised him most frequently advancing hurriedly toward the station as the train entered--both late, of course. She rehearsed the meeting many times, never without a pricking sense of awkwardness, for she now fully realised that when a woman and her husband have not communicated save on the wire for nearly a year, the first interview is liable to constraint. He always had been difficult to talk to. Would he be bored if she tried to entertain him as Ora would entertain Mark: with such excerpts of their many experiences as a confiding husband might appreciate? She never had understood him. Out of her greater knowledge of the world and men should she be better able to fathom the reserves of that strange silent nature--or did she really care whether she could or not? Although she had made up her mind to greet him at the station with the warmth of an old friend, and flatter him with her delight in returning home, she had not the faintest idea how she should carry off the long evening--if the train were on time.

It was not. Probably no Northwestern train has arrived on time in the history of the three railroads. Ida’s train, due at seven in the evening, arrived at midnight. Her Pullman was at the end of the long dark platform, and as she walked slowly toward the station building--which looked like the bunk-house of an abandoned mining camp in the desert--searching for someone to carry her hand baggage--porters being non-existent in the Northwest--she saw neither Gregory nor any other familiar face. For the first time in her life she felt a disposition to cry. But as she tossed her head higher and set her lips, a young man approached and asked if she were Mrs. Gregory Compton. He was a pleasant looking youth, and she was so grateful to be called by name that she forgot her new reserve and replied emphatically that she was.

“I am your chauffeur,” he said. “Your new car arrived a few days ago, and Mr. Compton ’phoned me to meet you. Have you any hand baggage?”

Ida indicated her portmanteau and hat box in the dark perspective and went on to inspect her car. It was a handsome limousine, lighted with electricity, and for a moment she took a childish pleasure in examining its fittings. But as the man returned and piled her baggage in front she asked irrepressibly:

“Is Mr. Compton not in Butte?”

“No, ma’am. He hasn’t been in Butte for weeks. Lively times out at the mine, I guess.”

“And my house? Had I not better go to a hotel?”

“Oh, the house is all right. Mr. Compton’s secretary ’phoned to an agency, and they put in three or four in help. I guess you’ll find everything all right.”

Ida entered her car, but scowled at its luxuries. By this time she was “mad clean through.” “The famous American husband!” she thought, gritting her teeth. “Best in the world--not. If it’s my horse, my dog, my wife with an Englishman, it’s business first last and always with an American. European men are courteous whether they mean it or not, but Americans only remember to be polite when they have time. Ten months and he can’t leave his mine long enough to meet me when I arrive at midnight!”

Her pleasure in returning to Butte had turned as flat as spilt champagne. She did not even glance at the gay electric signs and midnight activities of Broadway as her car rolled through that sleepless thoroughfare toward the West Side. But when her chauffeur, who had ignored the speed limit, stopped abruptly before a large house of admirable architecture and blazing with lights, her face flushed with excitement and she forgot her recalcitrant spouse. The door was opened at once and two maid servants ran down the steps. They were young, neatly dressed and capped, and it was evident that their service was dictated not only by curiosity but by sympathy.

“Welcome home, ma’am,” one of them, a Swede, said shyly as Ida stepped to the pavement. “It’s too bad your train was so late. The cook’s got a nice hot supper for you.”

Ida, who was not easily touched, felt as grateful to these smiling girls as to her friendly chauffeur, and for a moment was tempted to “come down off her perch” and revel in human companionship. But she knew that it “wouldn’t work”; she merely thanked them graciously and ascended the wide steps of her new home, that palatial residence of cream-colored pressed brick of her unswerving desires. While the maids were taking her bags and boxes upstairs, she walked through the large rooms of the lower floor. Everything was in the best modern style of furnishing, the prevailing tone dim and rich, with Eastern rugs on the hardwood floors; French tapestries and carved oak furniture and stained glass in the library--also a few books; paler tapestries set in panels in the immense drawing-room, and many beautiful pieces of furniture carefully selected with an eye to both contrast and mating. Out of this room opened a dining-room that looked like a baronial hall, and although the Murphys had taken their silverware they had left their china, imported from Limoges, and their glass ware, made for them by a Venetian firm that had supplied Ida’s grandes dames for thirty years. In short it was one of those stately and sumptuous interiors, furnished by the best houses in New York, which one associates exclusively with the three or four great cities of the United States, and is always unwarrantably surprised to find in the newer cities of the West.

Ida made a pretence of eating her dainty supper, remembered that she was now a grande dame and visited the kitchen to say an appreciative word to the cook, then ascended to her bedroom divided between anger and a depression so foreign to her temperament that she barely recognised it for what it was.

The large upper hall had been fitted up as a billiard room, and with a continuous divan broken only by the doors of the bedrooms. Ida threw it an appreciative glance, but it merely emphasised the fact that there was no man in the house, and she did not linger. Mrs. Murphy, evidently a brunette, had furnished her bedroom and dressing-room in primrose yellow and much lace. Ida approved both as unreservedly as she had the rest of the house, thankful there was nothing to alter; like many women she had consummate taste in dress and none whatever for house decoration; although unlike most of these disparate ladies she was quite aware of her deficiencies. She knew when a room was all that it should be, but could not have conceived one of the details, much less the unimpeachable combination. The sex instinct teaches those subtleties of personal adornment likely to allure the male, and arrest the anxious eye of other females, but ancestral brain-cells are necessary for the more civilised accomplishment.

Ida’s eyes fell on the telephone beside her bed and lingered. She forgot her beautiful room and the successive throbs of gratified ambition, in an overwhelming desire to call up Gregory and tell him what she thought of him. But she was a woman in whom calculation was stronger than impulse, and in the past year she had learned to control her temper, not only because a carefully nourished refinement had crowded out some of the weeds of her nature, but because her ever-growing intelligence despised lack of self-control in all things. So she merely undressed herself, her eyes wandering every few minutes to the telephone. It was incredible that he did not ring her up. That, at least, would take but a few moments of his precious time.

However, she fell asleep immediately after her bath, and it was the telephone bell that awakened her at eight o’clock. This time she frowned at it, for she wanted to sleep; but she sat up, put the receiver to her ear and asked languidly: “Well?”

A strange man’s voice replied: “Is this Mrs. Compton?”

“Yes. Why am I disturbed so early?”

“I’m sorry--this is Mr. Compton’s secretary speaking--but Mr. Compton told me to call you at eight o’clock. He always comes in for breakfast at this time--here he is.”

“Hello! How are you? What time did you get in?” Gregory’s voice was elaborately polite and as eager as any lover’s of yesteryear.

“Are you interested?” Ida’s heart beat thickly, but her tones were crisp. “I arrived at midnight. Really, I expected you to meet me. That is generally considered the decent thing to do.”

“Oh! I’m sorry it was impossible. I can’t leave the mine at present. How did you like the house?”

“I am enchanted with it--and with the limousine. When are you coming in?”

“I can’t say at present. I dare not leave for a moment. You will find a deposit to your credit at the Daly bank.”

“Thanks. Would--shall I run out?”

“Better not. There is always danger of rows.”

“But of course I’m wild to see the mine. You forget how famous it is.”

“Better wait awhile. It really isn’t safe.”

“Very well. How’s your wound? Where were you hurt, anyhow?”

“Not worth mentioning, as I cabled you, and I suppose you got my telegram in New York saying I was all right again. Sure you got everything you want?”

“I am overwhelmed by all this luxury, and your generosity.”

“Glad you like it. Has Mrs. Blake gone to California?”

“She went directly from the steamer. How is Mark getting on. I’ve had only notes from Ora.”

“All right. He doesn’t write but has telegraphed once or twice. He’d better stay below several months. Write Mrs. Blake to persuade him to take things easy. He had a close call. I can get along without him for awhile, but I can’t afford to lose him. Will you see to this?”

“I’ll write Ora today. She’s in no hurry to return to Butte--was delighted at the prospect of going to California, and intends to take Mark to Santa Barbara, where she knows a lot of people.”

“Ah! Good. Well, I must get some breakfast. Amuse yourself.”

“And you won’t be in for several days?”

“Afraid not. Good-bye.”

Ida set the receiver back on the table, but it was some minutes before she lay down again. She sat thinking, with compressed lips. Born with intuitive knowledge of men, she had, as she once remarked to Ora, turned a goodly number of them inside out during the past year. Gregory Compton did not intend to live with her again. She knew this as conclusively as if his kind matter-of-fact tones had expressed the direct message. Before she left home it never had occurred to Ida to wonder if her husband still loved her or not, and she had learned to accept his consuming masculine interest in matters mineralogic as all in the day’s work. Now she wondered if he had ceased to love her then or since. That he took no further interest in her as a woman, although amiably determined to do his duty as her legal provider, would have been almost patent to an imagination as riotous as Ora’s; to Ida, practical and clear-sighted, there was not a loophole for delusion.

In a few moments she relaxed the tension of her body and lay down.

“Well!” she thought impatiently, “what’s the matter with me, anyhow? Isn’t it what I always hopefully looked forward to? Did I ever pretend to be anything but resigned--or to be in love with him after the first few weeks? I guess I’m spoiled with too much devotion, that’s what. Seeing too many men lose their heads. Much their old heads are worth. But I guess I don’t like being turned down for once. Goose. It’s my lay to cut out pique and sing a song of thanksgiving that I’ve got pretty nearly everything I ever romanced about and set my mind on. It’s a pretty good old world when things come your way, and women’ll never be happy till they learn to put men in the same place that men put us--on a handy little side-track. I’ve got a whole parlour car instead of an upper berth like some poor devils, so I’ll quit whining. But if there’s another woman in the case, let them both look out--that’s all!”

III

Ida slept for two hours longer and rose in a philosophical mood. As she more than once had remarked to Ora, “nothing in life is just what you figured it out beforehand”; and this, one of life’s most unwelcome lessons, it had not taken her twenty-six years to learn. She had, in fact, accepted and docketed it while women twice her age were nursing their illusions.

She had expected to be met at the station not only by her husband but by Ruby and Pearl, to say nothing of reporters. “She had slunk in like a nobody,” and her husband declined to feed the fires of her vanity, blazing so merrily these last ten months. Never mind. She had the genius of quick readjustment and a sharp eye for the next move in the great law of compensation.

“And believe me,” she thought, as she put the finishing touches to her smart morning street costume, and taught the admiring Swede how to pin on a veil, “the gods have provided the goods pretty liberally, and I don’t belong to the immortal order of female jackasses. Nine-tenths of women’s troubles, mental and physical, sprout in that hothouse corner of their skulls they call imagination. None of it in mine. Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we shall die. Wait till I’m launched in Butte. And just wait till I give a dinner party to the second son of an English duke. Tra la la!”

Before the morning was over even philosophy had folded her wings. If life had been niggardly yesterday she gave with both hands today. When Ida arrived at the bank she was received with exceeding deference by the vice-president and informed that he had recently invested two hundred thousand dollars in her name, acting on instructions from Mr. Compton; and that as a large part of it was in mortgages the interest in some cases ran as high as eight per cent. The money had been placed in his hands for investment shortly after the great land deal, details of which had reached the public ear in due course and greatly added to the prestige of Gregory Compton. In fact it had invested his remote and ambiguous personality with an almost sinister significance. As Ida listened to the story of this transaction (she barely had opened a newspaper in New York and knew nothing of it), she found herself wondering if it could be true that once she had possessed this man of whom even bankers spoke with bated breath. It was patent that they stood in awe not only of the rapid and masterly strokes which had increased his little patrimony by something over two millions in less than a year, but of his colossal luck, his sensational reputation as a “winner”, and his open defiance of the greatest of all great trusts.

It seemed to Ida, as she sat in the vice-president’s office listening to his classification of her husband with Marcus Daly, W. A. Clark, and F. Augustus Heinze, the three commanding figures heretofore in the financial history of Montana, and to predictions that Compton would go farther than any one of his predecessors, that she might have known Gregory in his extreme youth or in some previous existence; but that this man who now not only ranked first in the eyes of all Montana, but had focussed the attention of a continent, no longer touched her life save as a fairy-godfather. It was the first time that she had appreciated his fame. She had been absorbed in Europe and its diversions--and diverters; the new wealth had been accepted as a matter of course; her imagination had not been powerful enough to visualise at a distance what her mind grasped the moment the facts were presented to her in the measured yet glowing terms of a bank’s president.

“He always did feel himself a cut above me,” she thought grimly as she left the building and walked down Main Street. “And now, I suppose, he thinks Perch of the Devil is Mount Olympus, and that he is some god. It would be fun to put a nick or two in his halo--but never mind: I’ve got a cool two hundred thousand--_and_ a palatial residence, _and_ a limousine--sounds like a fairy tale. There’s nothing mean about him, anyhow.”

When she reached her beautiful home she found four reporters awaiting her. They apologised for not meeting her at the train, but as hour after hour had passed with discouraging reports, they finally had gone home to recuperate for the next day’s labours. Ida dismissed the last of her regrets, and told them all that she wished Butte to know at once, showed the women the contents of her trunks, which the maids were unpacking, promised to let them know when the newer Paris wardrobe arrived, and finally gave them lunch. Reporters are the quickest people in the world to detect affectations, assumptions, and false values, and the most merciless in their exposure; but, although these four were on the alert, they could find neither traces of original commonness nor imitation of the British aristocracy. Ida apparently had consigned the slang of her former class to the limbo of careless grammar, and she was so simple and natural that they failed to discover how clever she was; they agreed, as they walked down Broadway, that she was merely a marvel of adaptability, like so many others that had done credit to the great state of Montana, to say nothing of the fluid West in general.

But, although Ida could be anything she chose when occasion demanded, she always sought relief from the strain as quickly as possible. Immediately after the departure of the reporters she telephoned for her limousine and drove to the large “Block” in the heart of the business district where Miss Ruby Miller kept the looks of the Butte ladies up to par. As she left the elevator she saw that the familiar door was open as usual and the old screen before it. She tapped discreetly, and Miss Ruby came out into the hall, removing the cold cream from her hands with her apron.

“Ide!” she cried rapturously, throwing both arms about her friend’s velvet shoulders. “Glory be, but I’m glad to see you and you do look fine----”

“How mean of you not to meet me----”

“We had it all fixed and supper here, but gave it up at ten o’clock. For all we knew you might not get in till morning, and you know how we work----”

“Well, I’ll forgive you if you both come to dinner with me tonight. I want to have one good old time before I sit up and play the grande dame act for weeks on end----”

“I guess you’re one now without any play-acting. You look the real thing all right. And I guess we won’t see so awful much of you now----”

“Do you mean because I’m harnessed up to a bunch of money----” began Ida in high indignation.

“Oh, I know you’ll always feel the same, but grand dames and our sort don’t gee at the same table. The West is democratic but it ain’t too democratic. Don’t think I’m jealous. You’re just where I’d like to be myself, and I’m proud that one of us has got to the top so quick. My! But Mr. Compton’s a wonder. To think that I ever dared call him Greg--even behind his back. Well, he’ll be just as proud of you as you are of him. Pearl’ll want to see your hats.”

“She can copy them all. Be sure to come early.”

She felt warmed by the little interview, but as she went down in the elevator she admitted to herself that her future intercourse with her old friends must be sporadic, no matter what her loyalty; and she wondered if her new friends would take their place; or even be to her the half of what Ora had become in the long intimacy of travel. She shrugged her handsome shoulders. If you elected to mount in life, you must pay the toll. Were she abruptly returned to the old cottage in East Granite Street certainly Ruby and Pearl would not compensate her. No, not for a moment. You may slip back in life if you are not strong enough to hold on, but you do not deliberately turn back even for the friends of your youth. Neither does Progress halt and sit down to wait for its failures to catch up. Ida leaned back in her limousine and met the interested eyes of many pedestrians of both sexes as her chauffeur drove her about for an hour to get the air, and incidentally to be looked at.

Today she was in a mood to enjoy Butte, and she deliberately summoned the long anticipated sensations. She revelled in the gaunt grey ugliness of Anaconda Hill which flung its arrogant head high above the eastern end of the great hill itself; in the sensation of driving over miles of subterranean numbered streets, some of them three thousand feet below, to which that famous mass of rock and dirt and angular buildings was the portal. She leaned far out of her car to admire the glittering mountains that looked like blue ice topped with white, and decided that they were far more original and beautiful than the Alps of Austria and Switzerland; certainly they tugged at her heartstrings and at the same time filled her with an unprecedented desire to sing. She noticed for the first time that the violet foothills against the nearer mountain east of the city seemed to close the end of the streets as the Alps did in Innspruck, and gave the ragged overgrown camp clinging to its high perch in the Rockies a redeeming touch of perfect beauty.

She drove out to Columbia Gardens, bought flowers from the conservatory for her rooms, and wandered about recalling the many gay times she had had in the dancing pavilion. But her eye was suddenly arrested by the steep mountain behind, then dropped slowly to the base. It was there that she had promised to marry Gregory Compton. She remembered his young passion and her own. She had never felt anything like it again; nor had he ever been quite the same. Was it one of those “supreme moments” novelists so blithely alluded to? The logical inference of that old bit of bathos was that such moments had no duplicates. She felt faint and dizzy for a moment; then walked back to her car, smiling grimly as she realised that she had experienced a fleeting echo of that vast unattainable desire women live and die cherishing or bewailing. “Poor things! Poor things!” she thought, with the first pang of pity her sex had ever inspired. “No wonder they go in for suffrage, art, work, any old thing. Home,” she added to the chauffeur.

She peremptorily dismissed all thought of the past during the drive back to town and reverted to her pleasure in once more feeling a part of her surroundings, hideous though they might, for the most part, be; instead of walking with alert critical eye through what always must seem to her the animated pages of ancient history. But her complacency received a sudden shock. The car was rolling along Park Street when her eye rested upon a man’s face vaguely familiar. She had bowed graciously and the face was behind her before she realised that the man was Professor Whalen, and that, for a second, she had looked into a pair of pale blue eyes that sent her a swift message of hate.

Ida shuddered. The warm light air of her beloved Rockies turned cold and heavy. “I feel as if I’d stepped on a snake and just missed getting bitten,” she thought, putting her sensations into a concrete form, after her habit. “I had forgotten the little viper was alive, and I wish to goodness he wasn’t.” She had flouted superstition always, but she could not shake off the sense of menace and evil that had vibrated from the man until she was within her own doors once more. Then she became as oblivious of Whalen’s existence as during that late exotic period when everything connected with her old life had seemed too crude to be real.

The parlour maid handed her a note that had arrived an hour before from Mr. Luning, Mark’s partner. Mrs. Blake, he wrote, had bought a present for Mrs. Compton in Paris and sent it to the care of her husband’s firm. Mr. Luning had gone the day before to Great Falls to clear it in the Custom House, and now had the pleasure of forwarding the boxes, etc.

“Good gracious!” exclaimed Ida, “what can it be?”

“There’s four big boxes in the back hall, ma’am.”

Ida lost no time. If Ora had given her a present it must be worth looking at, and she went as rapidly as dignity would permit to the nether regions and ordered the boxes opened. The present proved to be a magnificent silver service, from many dozens of “flat ware” to massive platters, vegetable dishes, flower, fruit and bon-bon pieces, and candelabra. The delighted servants made a shining display on the dining-room table, and after Ida had gloated over it for a time and informed her audience that it was copied from a royal service in the Louvre, she went suddenly up to her bedroom. This time she did shed a few tears, and as she looked at her handkerchief in some wonder she decided that there was at least one person that she loved, “hard-headed” as she was, and that Ora Blake had found the one soft spot in her flinty heart and wormed herself into it. She went to her desk immediately and wrote Ora a letter that was almost tender, admitting that she missed her “like fury”, and begging her to return soon.

“Greg telephoned this morning,” she concluded, oblivious that she was betraying the fact that she had not seen her husband, “and told me to tell you to keep Mark down below for several months. But his lungs must be well by this time or he’d be dead. And the rest of him will mend all the sooner in this magnificent air. Heavens, but it’s good to breathe it again! It makes one feel as if the atmosphere of Europe hadn’t been aired for a century. I’ve got a wonder of a house and a jim dandy of a limousine, but ever since I came I’ve felt kind of homesick, and I’ve just realised it’s for you, old girl. So, come home. Once more ten million thanks.”

And when Ruby and Pearl dined with her that night she realised that all her old zest in their society was gone. Ida Hook, at least, had “passed on.”

IV

It was on the morning of this same day that Gregory sat alone in his cabin uncommonly idle, for he still spent the greater part of his time underground, when not away on business connected with his new investments and deals. For the last week he had not left the hill, and although he was on the alert to hear his geological acumen vindicated, he was in no mood to find pleasure in his mine. His conscience, an organ that troubled him little, was restive. In spite of his liberal disbursements, he knew that he had treated Ida unfairly. He had long since made up his mind to obliterate her from his personal life, and, if the truth must be told about a man who had snapped his fingers in the face of the most formidable combination of capital in the world, he was afraid to meet his wife. Vanity, he argued, in such women takes the place of warmth, and he had no mind to burden his memory and resource with an endless chain of subterfuges; nor had he any relish for the bald statement that since he could not have the woman he wanted he would have none; and that his mine, as complex and mysterious, as provocative of dreams, as capricious and satisfying as woman herself--to say nothing of hard work and increasing power--was to fill his life.

Ida might rage, stamp, scream, with her hands on her hips, her superb eyes flashing. Worse still, she might weep, lamenting that he loved her no longer--if he made her hurried friendly calls. Far, far worse, he might succumb to her beauty and superlative femaleness and hate himself ever after. His was to be a life of unremitting and constructive work; he must keep that blue flame burning on the altar in his sanctuary. If he never paused to draw it up into his consciousness he must know it was there.

Better stay away until she understood all that it was necessary she should know, wore out her pique in private, and accepted the situation. But he would have felt better this morning if he had heard that her train had arrived early in the evening. He might be ruthless, even where women were concerned, but he was also sensitive and capable of tenderness.

But he was not thinking of Ida alone. He was listening for the footsteps of Joshua Mann, and in a few moments he heard them, as well as the angry growl of his foreman’s voice. Mann entered without ceremony.

“I’ve been looking for you, sir. We’ve the devil’s own luck again----”

“Apex struck the Primo vein?”

“No, and won’t for fifty feet yet. But--well--I hate to say it--we’ve lost our vein--cut off as short as if it had been sawed. Of course, it’s faulted, and God only knows where its dropped to--or how far. A prettier shoot of ore was never uncovered. What’s worrying me is that--oh, hell!--just suppose that’s what Amalgamated is sinking on. My head’s going round. Can I have something?”

Gregory waved his hand toward the cupboard where his visitors found refreshment. When Mann had braced himself, his employer tapped a large sheet of paper that lay on the table.

“Come here,” he said. “I made this map some time ago, and calculated to a day when you would lose the vein. I guessed our vein had faulted before Amalgamated got busy. But don’t worry. They’re either on a parallel vein or on a mere fork.” His pencil moved along the vein already stoped, travelled over the fault line and recovered a vein further down. “Hundred feet,” he said. “With air drills and unless the fault breccia is uncommonly hard, which I don’t think is the case, we should find it in less than three weeks. They can’t get through that rock for at least a month. Even then they may not touch us, but then again they may, and we must be there first. Cut across the fault at once and follow it on the footwall side to the east. Get well into the footwall. If you don’t recover the vein inside of a hundred feet I’ll stand to lose a thousand dollars and you’ll be the winner.”

“I guess not,” said Mann admiringly. “But, by jing! I was worried. You never can tell about them faults. When the old earth split herself up and got to slipping she not only lost one side of herself sometimes, but twisted about as if she was having fun with the apex law of Montana in advance. But I figure out that you’re like old Marcus Daly--you’ve got a sort of X-ray in your eye that sees the ore winking below. So long.”

He departed to carry encouragement to the anxious miners, and Gregory went out and walked along his hill. By this time he knew every inch of it, and had found indications of ore in his other claims while superintending the development work necessary before perfecting his patents. If Amalgamated sank on his present vein and the courts enjoined him from working it until the matter of apex rights was settled, he would simply go ahead and sink through the carbonates in his other claims to those vast deposits of chalcopyrite with which he was convinced his hill was packed. He knew the geological history of every mine in Montana, and while he had given up all hope of finding gold on his estate save in small incidental values, he believed that he possessed one of the greatest copper deposits in the Rocky Mountains. And now that even one vein of his hill was threatened, he dismissed his old dreams with a shrug and transferred his undivided affection to the exciting treasure the earth had given him. There were few surprises in gold mines. A great copper mine might make geological history. In two districts, Butte and Castle Mountain, copper glance, an ore of secondary enrichment, had been found far down in the sulphide zone below chalcopyrite, chief of the primary ores. He believed that he should find glance at depth of nine hundred feet. If there were masses of it he should take out millions in a year, for chalcopyrite was the richest of the permanent copper ores of this region, running as high as 79.8.

He had been on amiable terms with the manager and engineer of the Apex Mine since the battle underground, and he crossed the claim unmolested to make his daily inspection of the Primo shaft house. But there had been no further attempt to use the cross-cut, although the Apex people had managed before they were discovered to drive to the point upon which they expected to sink.

Gregory walked up the hill beyond to look at the cottage just completed, which was to be occupied by the manager and foreman of the Primo Mine as soon as Mark reopened it. He had been about to begin operations, cutting across the fault Gregory had demonstrated--a fault parallel to the one in Perch of the Devil--when he was shot nearly to death.

The cottage was situated in a clearing in the pine woods, somewhat apart from the cabins, which were being renovated and made comfortable for the miners. Gregory was so positive that the pyroxenite vein would be recovered just beyond the row of aspens, some sixty feet below the tableland, that Mark, who believed his friend to be an inspired geologist, was preparing for a long period of mining; although if it had been a quartz mine Gregory, sure as he was of his judgment, would not have permitted him to put up a mill and concentrating plant until sufficient ore had been blocked out to warrant the expense. But pyroxenite went direct to the smelter, and a cottage could always be rented.

The little bungalow had two bedrooms besides one for a Chinese servant, a bathroom, and a large living-room with a deep fireplace, a raftered ceiling, and pine walls stained brown. Gregory, as he realised how cosy it would be when furnished, wondered that he had been satisfied with his two-roomed cabin for so long. He had been too absorbed to think of comfort, but today he felt a desire for something more nearly resembling a home than a perch. He looked through the windows at the sibilant pines, the pink carpet of primrose moss, the distant forests rising to the blue and white mountains; and then he sighed as he glanced slowly about the long room and pictured it furnished in warm tones of red and brown, wondering if either of the men would be married. It would be an ideal home for a honeymoon.

He twitched his shoulders impatiently and went outside. To his surprise he saw a wagon ascending the hill laden with lumber, the seats occupied by the contractor and carpenters that had built the bungalow.

“What’s up?” he asked, as the contractor leaped to the ground.

“Another bungalow. Perhaps you could suggest a site. It’s to be near this, and the same size. We had a telegram from Mr. Blake yesterday.”

“But what does he want of two cottages?”

“Can’t say, sir, unless he means to come out here to get well.”

“That’s nonsense. He knows he could stay at my house on the ranch.”

But Gregory was not in the habit of thinking aloud. After indicating a site he swung back to his hill, angry and apprehensive. Could it be possible that Mark intended to spend the summer at the mine and bring his wife with him? As soon as he reached his cabin he sat down at his table, and after getting his friend’s present address from Luning, telephoned a long distance message to Pony to be telegraphed to Mr. Mark Blake in Santa Barbara. Its gist was that the weather was abominable and that Mark must not think of anything so foolish as to bring his weakened heart and lungs to this altitude. His services would be imperative later when his solicitous friend locked horns with Amalgamated, and meanwhile he was, for heaven’s sake, to take care of himself and remain on the coast until he was in a condition to work day and night.

He received an answer that afternoon.

“No intention of leaving here for two months. Lungs pretty good, but shall wait for leg to heal. Ora wants present cottage for herself as she intends to spend summer at mine. Will you be on the lookout for a manager? He can live in the lessee’s shack until the new cottage is built. Might begin operations at once. Hope this not too much trouble. Mark.”

This message was transmitted over the telephone, and, to the excessive annoyance of the operator, who happened to be the belle of Pony, Gregory asked her three times, and with no excess of politeness, to repeat it. The third time he wrote it out and stared at the words as if the unsteady characters were recombining into a sketch of the infernal regions.

“Good God!” he thought. “And I can’t get away!”

Was Mark mad? Was she mad? Then he realised the blissful ignorance of both regarding the drama he so often had swept from the stage of his mind, that secret dweller in the most secret recesses of his soul. Doubtless Ora never had thrown him a thought since they parted at her gate. He remembered her expressed intention to live at her mine when the lease was up, her desire to adventure underground, her intense appreciation of the romance of mining. He closed his eyes, his face relaxed. So long as she cared nothing for him there was no danger; he might daydream about her a bit. At least--at last!--he should see her again, talk to her, work with her, help her as no one else could help her. If the association he would have avoided was inevitable why not welcome it as a brief oasis in what must be an arid life, so far as mortal companionship was concerned?

But he was not the man to dream long. Presently he opened his eyes, set his jaw until it looked a yard long, put on his overalls, and went underground.

V

Butte long since had made up its mind as to the social future of Mrs. Gregory Compton. That Ida’s mother had been a laundress and her father a miner concerned the ladies of Butte as little as many similar outcroppings of family history peculiar not only to Montana but to all regions of recent exploitation and rapid growth.

In the hearty welcome extended to the newcomer, with either the money or the personality to command its attention, Butte more nearly resembles London than any other city in the world. To pasts she is indifferent, provided they are not resurrected as models for a present: she asks no questions of a pretty, amiable, amusing woman who pays her the compliment of sojourning in her midst, so long as the lady exercises an equal reticence--assuming reticence to be her virtue--and plays the social game with _savoir faire_. Distractions on that high perch are few, social life ebbs oftener than it flows, many of the large houses are closed for the greater part of the year, and only the very young, who care not where they are so long as they may dance, find life in an overgrown mining camp as satisfactory as their elders find New York.

But the hospitality of Butte is genuine and founded largely upon common sense. Most of the women composing its society have enjoyed wealth for many years: they have travelled extensively; and if they continue to make their homes in Butte it is solely on account of their own business interests or those of their men. They argue that to deprive themselves of even the casual diversion, assuming the exclusive airs of large and resourceful communities, would merely put them on a level with thousands of other small towns slowly stagnating, be unworthy of their worldly experience, and of the large free spirit of the Northwest which has pervaded that isolated camp since they came with their husbands or fathers to take a hand in its history.

As for Mrs. Gregory Compton all they knew of her in her present stage of development was favourable, although several had a lively remembrance of the rosy black-haired Ida Hook delivering her excellent mother’s laundry work at their back door, and receiving more or less of her “cheek.” But they had heard, at the time, of her lessons with Professor Whalen, and of Ora Blake’s coincident interest. Of her social advantages and triumphs in Europe the press had kept them informed; she returned to Butte, in fact, as one new-born. Moreover, she now owned one of the finest houses in the city for entertaining, they knew that she had elected to shine in Butte rather than in London (that Mecca of so many quick-rich women without position in their own country); and above all she was the wife of Gregory Compton, the man in whom Montana was beginning to feel assured it could take an unequivocal pride, not only for his diabolical cleverness, but because he was as “straight” as the Twentieth Century in the United States of America would permit. Butte felt devoutly grateful to Ida for being and returning, and, with that utter lack of affectation that characterised it, began calling two days after her arrival.

Ida would have been glad to have had Ora’s support and advice during this ordeal--which caused her far more apprehension than ducal week-ends. But she summoned all her acquired knowledge and tact, fortified it with her native and supreme confidence in herself, and made no mistakes. Butte was charmed with the severe rich gowns that set off her haughty head and warmly colored face and the long, flowing, yet stately lines of her beautiful figure; charmed also with a manner that was both simple and dignified. She showed no enthusiasm at being taken up so promptly, neither did she quite accept it as a matter of course. If her talk ranged freely over common acquaintance in London, the Paris dressmakers of the season, the new opera, the plays of the moment in New York, it was without glibness, and she took a firm hold on the older and more important women of the community by confiding to them that she should not make her first venture in the difficult art of entertaining until her friend Mrs. Blake returned to help her through the novitiate. Many of the younger women were the wives of Amalgamated officials and attorneys, or of men in a relationship to that mighty power but one degree further removed; but the men individually were too broad-minded to cherish a personal grudge against Compton, and they were, moreover, quite as eager as their mates to meet his handsome wife.

During the ensuing fortnight Ida dined out every night, went to a bridge party every afternoon, as well as to several luncheons, teas, and dances. She wore a different costume every time she appeared in public; but although there was at the moment nothing in Butte to compare with her gowns she never produced the effect of outshining the other women by anything but her beauty and individual style. In short her success was so immediate and so final that, although she liked these ladies of her native town even better than she had anticipated, her rapid conquest soon lost its novelty, and she wished that Ora would return; not only because she missed her increasingly, but because to entertain in her great house would give her a new and really poignant excitement, and lift her definitely from the ranks of the merely received.

Gregory telephoned every few days, and never twice at the same hour. When she found herself restlessly awaiting the ring of the instrument, she dashed out of the house angrily and took a walk. If she found upon her return that he had called her up, she felt that he had given her the excuse to telephone to him, and she soon learned at what hours she could find him either in his cabin or down in the mine, where he had a booth. She was furious at what she called her raging female vanity, and if she could have found another man to assuage it she would not have hesitated to press him into service at whatever cost to himself. But, as happens more often than not, there was not an unmarried man in Butte old enough to be worthy of a fastidious woman’s notice. She would have yawned in the face of “Brownies”, and, although more than one roving husband would have placed himself at her disposal, she was the last woman to court scandal or even gossip. She longed for the advent of Lord John Mowbray, whose gayety would distract her mind, and whose devotion make her forget that she was a neglected wife. She could throw dust into the eyes of Butte by pretending to be his matrimonial sponsor.

But for the first time she wished that she had children. The great house seemed to demand the patter of small feet, the slamming of doors, a row of naughty faces peering over the banister of the second floor. It was terribly silent. And yet she had felt settled down in that house at once, so long had one of its kind been the object of her unswerving desire; its atmosphere already seemed to hang listless with ennui. She subscribed to both the state and city suffrage fund, for she felt a new sympathy for women who were trying to fill their lives, and sincerely hoped they would invent some game that would make them independent of men.

Seventeen days after her return she was sitting in the library, trying to forget her solitary luncheon in a novel when she heard the front doorbell ring. Her servants were amiable but not too competent, and she waited impatiently and in vain for one of them to answer the summons. She restrained the impulse to open the door herself. This was now an obsolete custom among her new acquaintance; although having the front door shut in one’s face while the colored maid took one’s card to the lady of the stately mansion was hardly an improvement, and this had been her experience a day or two ago. She rang the bell in the library. Still there was no sign of life from the high-priced young women who doubtless were gossipping over the back fence. Ida’s curiosity overcame her. The hour was too early for callers. It might be a cable. She stole to the front door and peered through its curtain of Honiton lace. Then she gave a war whoop which would have horrified her servants--who, careless as they were, stood in awe of her--flung the door open, caught Ora in her arms and almost carried her into the library.

“Good Lord, but I’m glad to see you!” she cried. “I’m just about dead of lonesomeness. Why didn’t you telegraph? I’d have met you if your train didn’t get in till two in the morning.”

Ora laughed and disentangled herself, although she kissed Ida warmly. “I just got in--came here on the way from the station and sent my bags to the house--but I always did hate to be met. How beautiful your house is.”

“It’s all right. But it’s about as cheerful to live alone in as one of those palaces in the Via Garibaldi! My, but I’m glad you’re here. You’re the only person I ever missed, and being a real lady for weeks on end is telling on my plebeian health. I didn’t have any relief even in New York. How’s Mark?”

“Quite well, except for his broken leg.”

“Is he here?”

“Oh, no--I left him in Santa Barbara--that is to say at the Club House at Montecito, the fashionable suburb. He has a jolly circle of friends there, and has no desire to travel any further until he can walk.”

Ida put her hands on Ora’s shoulders and turned her round to the light. “What’s up?” she demanded. “You look fine, as pretty as a picture--but--different, somehow.”

“I’ve left Mark.”

Ida glanced into the hall. The opening of back doors indicated that one of the maids had condescended to remember she was a wage earner. “Let’s go upstairs,” said Ida; and as they crossed the hall she said to the girl who was hastening to the front door with a propitiating smile, “You’re just about ten minutes too late, as usual, and the next time it happens you lose your job. I’m not the sort that sits down and wails over the servant question. This house will be run properly if I have to send East for help. Now put on your hat and run down to Mrs. Blake’s house and bring up her bags, and tell them to send her trunks here.

“Yes, you’re going to stay with me for the present,” she said, as Ora protested. “Don’t say another word about it.”

Ora shrugged her shoulders, and when they were in Ida’s bedroom she took off her hat and coat and wandered about aimlessly for a few moments. Ida was almost breathless with impatience and a curious sense of apprehension that vaguely recalled the strange terror Ora had inspired on the day of their meeting. Ora wore a blue frock, and Ida noticed that the yellow room did not dim her fair radiance. If possible she was holding her head higher than usual, her skin “gleamed” more than ever, there was a curious light in her always brilliant eyes, half defiant, half exultant.

“Do sit down!” said Ida sharply, cutting short Ora’s voluble approval of the room. “There, that’s right,” as Ora flung herself into a chair. “Now, fire away. You’re brimming over with something. Do you mean that you’ve left Mark for good and all?”

“Yes.”

“Told him so?”

Ora nodded.

“Did you tell him about Valdobia, or what? For heaven’s sake open up.”

“No, I--I thought I wouldn’t tell him everything at once. I told him that I meant to spend the rest of my life in Europe, and that it was only fair to himself to divorce me--he can do it easily on the ground of desertion--and marry someone who would make a real home for him--make him happy.”

“Ah! Mark’s the sort women marry but don’t fall in love with. And what did he say when you handed him that?”

“He was rather broken up.”

“Really! And you? I always had an idea that when it came to the point you wouldn’t do it. You have high-falutin’ notions about honor, noblesse oblige, and all the rest of it, to say nothing of being really soft, as I once told you. There’s only one thing that would make you hard--to everyone else--and that’s being in love----”

“That is it!” exclaimed Ora eagerly. “I’ve made up my mind to marry Valdobia. I wasn’t so sure when I left Europe, but you know what separation often does----”

“Yes,” said Ida dryly, “I do. Well, Mark will have to take his medicine, I guess. I’ve never doubted, since Valdobia joined us in Genoa, that he was the man for you. It’s fate, I guess. But tell me what Mark said, after all. Did he consent?”

“There was nothing else to do. He knew I meant it. I broke it to him by degrees. Besides, he knew how it was long before I left for Europe. He had practically given me up. Of course he was fond of me--I had become a habit and made him comfortable, besides being useful to him--but--well, I gave him six years--my youth!” she burst out passionately. “What wouldn’t I give to wipe out those years, be twenty again and free! I tried to make him understand that I was no longer in the least like the bewildered undeveloped girl he had married; and that I bore as little resemblance to the intellectual automaton I made of myself later. I told him that I was awake once for all, and that rather than live again with a man I couldn’t care for I’d be boiled in oil. Then he understood.”

“I should think he might! Of course he asked if there was another man?”

“Yes, but I told him that was neither here nor there; that in any case I should leave him and live in Europe.”

“Poor Mark! Tied by the leg, and lost in the shuffle!”

“You know as well as I do that I have nothing in me for Mark and that if I cared as little for Valdobia it would only be fair to give him a second throw for happiness. When I left him he was quite resigned, and we have agreed to remain the best of friends. I shall leave him my power of attorney as before, and he will continue to manage my affairs.”

“How much more sensible we are in our Twentieth Century! No doubt he will visit you in the Palazzo Valdobia when he takes a whirl at Europe.”

“Why not? But tell me you think I did right, Ida?” Ora’s voice was very sweet and plaintive.

“You did what you were bound to do, I guess, when you met a man that could throw a lariat round the neck of that romantic imagination of yours. Right? I don’t know. I guess I’ve got the same old streak of Puritan Americanism in me, although if other people want to have _liaisons_ and divorces it’s none of my affair. Women will do more and more as they damn please, I guess, men having set them such a good example for a few centuries. But I simply hate the idea of losing you. I want you right here in Butte. Lord, I’ve almost forgotten may slang!”

Ora laughed with something like her old merriment. “Oh, you’ll have me for an escape valve for a while yet. Valdobia’s mother is dying of some lingering horrible disease. It wouldn’t be decent for me to go to Rome, and I should be lonely anywhere else. So, I’ve made up my mind to stay here during the summer at least, and realise a dream I used to indulge in before I ever knew I could fall in love.” Once more she looked straight at Ida, this time with the slow expectant smile of a child. “I’m going to reopen my mine and run it myself--of course I shall have a manager. Mark has written, or telegraphed, to Mr. Compton to find one for me--but I shall live out there and go down every day, and make believe I am doing something, too--at all events realise that it _is_ my mine. Mining has always--that is, always did fascinate me more than anything else on earth. I shall be devoted to Valdobia when I am married to him, but I simply must have that adventure first----”

“For heaven’s sake don’t go dotty like Gregory over a hole in the ground. If you get that bee buzzing round in your skull I pity poor Valdobia. If it were not for his mother I’d cable to him to come out----”

Ora’s face set with a hardness that arrested Ida’s observant eye. “Don’t you do anything of the sort. Mark said once about my father, ‘It was characteristic of him that when he quit he quit for good.’ I am always discovering more and more of my father in me. I’ll live that old dream and it will finish when Valdobia and I both are free. Then I shall wipe it off the slate--consign it to limbo.” She sprang to her feet and stretched out her arms. “I am going to do exactly as I please as long as I am free. Of course I am mad about Valdobia--you know that I wouldn’t marry him if I were not--but I am mad too about liberty and my mine. This is my only chance. And I am a Montanan, born in the Rocky Mountains. I want something of the life that has made my state famous before I become a European. I’ve never had anything of her but Butte. I want the wild mountains--I want, above all, the mine that has given me my freedom. I’m going to wear overalls and go down into the mine every day.”

“A sweet sight you’ll be!” said Ida disgustedly. “And the miners--Oh, they’ll just love the idea of having a woman at their heels! What on earth has got hold of you? It’s the only time I’ve ever known you to get off your base. Why, there’s nothing a woman can do at a mine unless she’s a graduated mining engineer, and nothing then that a man couldn’t do better. You’ll be in the way and you’ll soon be bored to death yourself. If you’re so crazy about Montana why don’t you do some of those great things for her that your father suggested? And how do you reconcile your marriage to an Italian with your devotion to your father’s memory?”

Ora turned away her head. “My father gave me too much of himself to expect me to play the rôle of ministering angel to anything. I intend to invest in Montana the greater part of all that I take out of my mine. If it gives me one of the great fortunes I shall endow my state in some way--as Mark may suggest. But I cannot live here. That is for ever settled. When I go to Europe I shall never return--not even to America. I shall forget my life here, everything connected with it--everything! One side of me is already European. I shall become wholly so.”

“Somehow,” said Ida slowly, and with the sensation of being so close to something that she couldn’t see it, “I don’t get the idea that you’re so mad about Valdobia. Long since I figured that when you did love a man you’d be a sort of white pillar of flame about him. I firmly believe that Valdobia is the man for you, but, well--he fell too quickly. He didn’t make you suffer, never kept you guessing for a minute. The women that turn men’s heads are a good deal like men themselves; they’ve got to be hurt hard and kept on tenterhooks before they are in a condition to accommodate the virus. You are fond of Valdobia, and well you may be, but mad isn’t the right word----”

“Oh, yes it is! It is!” Ora was walking up and down the room. “You must believe that I love him as I never dreamed I could love anybody----”

“Hi!” cried Ida. “Your letter-man! That’s what! You were more nearly in love with him than you are with Valdobia, and because, for some reason or other, you couldn’t get him. Where is he?”

Ora’s eyes looked large and blank. “That! I had quite forgotten it. It was the last of a long line of mental love affairs. Those always evaporate even from the memory when the real man comes along.” She sighed heavily and sat down once more. “I know that I shall be happy with Valdobia, only I am not happy now. That is so far off! And of course I feel badly about poor Mark. But I couldn’t help it. Not to do it would have been worse. And I should go off my head meanwhile if I didn’t have this mine. Do you think I could remain here in Butte and go to dinners and bridge parties? I should scream in their faces. I must have work. Be sure I can find something to do at the mine--I suppose there are a laboratory and assay office. And there will always be the excitement of hoping to find free milling gold--at present what could be more exciting than to drift for that lost vein?”

“It wouldn’t keep me awake nights. But have your own way. I don’t want you down with nerves, and that will happen if you don’t look out.”

“If I don’t get my own way.”

“Exactly. But I wish your way marched with mine. I’ve missed you like fury--Say!--here’s an idea: I’ll go back to Europe with you now if you like, and stay until you marry. There are lots of places we planned to go to and didn’t----”

“Ida, you are a dear! And you longed so for Butte. Why it would be like tearing an author from his unfinished magnum opus. Besides--well--you have a husband----”

“Oh, Lord! Gregory is running the Universe at present. Women don’t exist for him. Shall we go?”

Ora shook her head. Her face had turned from white to pale. “No. I must spend these last months of my freedom here in my state. And that lost vein--it pulls me. I _must_ have that life for a few months--for the first and last time. You--you--might spend your week-ends with me.”

Ida scowled and turned away her head. She had no intention of admitting even to Ora that Gregory deliberately avoided her. “Not I. I hate the sight of the De Smet ranch. Go, if you like, but I feel sure you will come in often. And before you go I wish you would do me a favour.”

“Of course I will.”

“Let me give you a dinner. I want to begin that sort of thing and you’ll furnish the excuse besides helping me out.”

“Very well. Have it soon. I want to go to the mine as quickly as possible. I shall begin to send out the furniture for my bungalow tomorrow.”

“A week’s notice will be enough. I’ll write the invitations today. There’s another reason I want to give this dinner. Gregory hasn’t been seen anywhere with me--hates going out. But I shall make him understand that he must come to my first dinner--or people will be talking--and I hate people prying into my affairs. Besides, it will be his duty to you as the wife of his best friend. (He needn’t know you’ve left Mark yet awhile.) I’m not hankering for the rôle of the neglected wife; and I’m sick of making excuses. For all Butte knew I might not have laid eyes on my husband since my return.”

And although she spoke bravely Ora knew that she had not. “We’ll have the dinner,” she said warmly. “And it will be great fun to get it up----”

“Now, come this minute and go to bed. You are to stay with me as long as you are in this camp, and I’m going to tone you up, and make you rest as we used to in Europe every afternoon--hard work in this altitude but it can be done. I’ve got to go to a bridge party now, and you are to sleep. If you feel rested when I get back, I’ll call up two or three of your old friends and ask them to come informally to dinner. So long.”

She closed the door of her best spare room on Ora and walked slowly back to her own, her brows drawn; once more quick with a sensation of profound uneasiness, of being close to something that she could not see. But it was not her habit to ponder for long over the elusive and obscure. “Guess I’m worried about Ora’s health,” she thought impatiently, and rang for her maid.

VI

Two days later Gregory received the following note from his wife:

DEAR GREGORY:

Ora is here, and before going out to the mine has promised to help me through the ordeal of my first big dinner. Entertaining goes with this house, and although I am beginning somewhat sooner, perhaps, than is necessary, I have my reasons. I have asked twenty-four people, the most important of the older and the younger married sets. The dinner is to be at eight o’clock Tuesday. I want you to come. Yow have been very generous, but there is one thing more that you can do for me and I feel that I have the right to demand it. If you no longer care for me, that is something I cannot help; nor you either for that matter. But so far as the world knows, I am your wife, and if we are never seen together there is bound to be disagreeable gossip. I don’t want to be gossipped about. It is vulgar and it complicates life. The Butte women I most wanted to know are all right, but the town has the usual allowance of fools and scandal mongers. By showing yourself at my first dinner in your own house you will muzzle them. You can arrive in time for dinner and take a late train back to Pony, if there is one. But please come. I am sure if you think it over you will admit that I am merely proving my new knowledge of the world in asking for your formal protection.

IDA.

Gregory read this note hastily when he found it in his morning mail-bag in company with many business letters, to which he also gave scant attention: he was in haste to go underground. There was still no sign of the lost vein, and nineteen days of the three weeks’ limit he had set himself were gone. But they broke into it that same afternoon. He barely left the mine until the following morning, but he finally sought his cabin and bed satisfied that the recovered vein of copper pyrite was, like the original, six feet thick and as rich in values. When he awoke he remembered Ida’s note, and although it had provoked a frown of annoyance when he read it, his spirits were now so ebullient that he not only admitted the justice of her demand, but would have granted almost anyone a reasonable request.

Moreover, as he reread the note, its restraint and dignity struck him forcibly, as well as its remote likeness to the Ida Hook he had wooed in Nine Mile Cañon. Certainly she had made the most of her opportunities!

And apparently she had recovered from her first disappointment, or pique--if, indeed, she had felt either--and he assumed that the last year, crowded with exceptional experiences, had made her over into something like a woman of the world. No doubt among her many accomplishments she had acquired self-control. (That she might also have acquired finesse did not occur to him.) He dismissed the fear that she would make a scene--and himself thoroughly uncomfortable. On the whole it would be interesting to see Ida as a bird of paradise. He remembered her in shirtwaists and serviceable skirts, and recalled that he had sometimes thought it a pity she should not have the plumage worthy of her beauty and style.

And if the fates had willed that he must meet Ora Blake again he preferred that the first interview should be in public.

He rang up Pony and in the course of half an hour was connected with Butte.

“Hello!” he said cordially, as he heard his wife’s voice. “Got your letter, but couldn’t find time to answer before. I’ll come to the dinner with pleasure.”

“Oh, I am so glad.” Ida’s tones were crisp and cool. There was none of the husky warmth that Gregory suddenly remembered; nor any of the old common inflection. “Are your evening togs at Mark’s?”

“Yes, will you send for them?”

“I’ll have everything here in one of the spare rooms. The maid will show you up if you are late. It takes me hours to dress.”

“All right. Say--Ida--I wish you’d persuade Mrs. Blake to give up that idea of coming out here. It won’t work. She’ll only be in the way of the men, and if there was a big row on would be one more responsibility for her manager. I suppose she knows I’ve opened up her mine. Besides, it’s no place for a woman anyhow. There are only a few women--miners’ wives--in my camp; none in the others.”

“I’ve told her all that. But--well--you don’t know Ora. Gambling--taking long chances--is in her blood, I guess. You should have seen her at Monte Carlo. You must take in Mrs. Cameron, but I am putting Ora on your left as it is time you two got acquainted. Try to dissuade her. I want her to stay here with me.”

“I’ll do my best. How are you getting on? Butte still panning out?”

“I adore Butte and find nothing to change. It’s too wonderful--to have all your old dreams come true like this! I hope your mine is behaving. I heard a rumour the other day that you had lost your vein----”

“Just found it again!”

Ida noted the exultant ring of his voice, and was about to laugh when she changed her tactics swiftly. “Good! I know just how fine you feel--and that it wasn’t the loss of money that worried you either. Well, the dinner will be a sort of celebration. Good-bye.”

“Good-bye.” There was a faint accent of surprise in Gregory’s voice. Ida smiled and returned to her interrupted toilette.

“Just let me get a good chance at him once more,” she thought. “I’ll be eating copper before I get through, but I don’t know him or his sex if he won’t be nibbling off the same chunk.”

VII

The next week was the busiest she had ever known. All the people that had called on her called again on Ora. Her cook collapsed when told to prepare a dinner for twenty-eight people, and Ida, who would not hearken to a public caterer and his too familiar idiosyncrasies, telegraphed to St. Paul for a chef. What moments she had to spare after consultations with this autocrat, with a temperamental designer of menu cards, and with two high-handed young women whom she had been persuaded by the charitable Mrs. Cameron to engage to decorate her rooms, were spent with certain works on copper and mining that she had procured from the public library.

She looked forward to the evening of her dinner party with a secret excitement that seemed to fork its lightning into every recess of her brain, and electrify it with a sense of the fulness of life--that hinted intoxicatingly of life’s perfections. Not only was she to live the wildest dream of Ida Hook, but she had made up her mind to bring the most important man in Montana to her feet on that triumphant night. That the man was her husband, won the first time without an effort, lost through her own indifference and ignorance, added tenfold to the zest of the game. She knew the impression he must retain of her: crude, obvious in her sex allurement, cheaply dressed, a sort of respectable mining-camp siren; all her fascinations second-rate, and her best points in the eyes of an absent-minded husband her good-natured mothering and admirable cooking.

If she had returned to find him as she had left him, a mere brilliant hard-working student, and automatically attentive to his home partner, no doubt she would have slipped into her original rôle at once, for she was normally amiable, and she had strict ideas of wifely duties, which her insistent vanity and deliberate flirtations never for a moment endangered. They also filled the practical wants of a nature not derived from artistic ancestors. She had had her “flyer”, and, allowing for social triumphs, returned to Butte to settle down; although it had been with a certain complacency that she had reflected during the homeward journey upon the altered circumstances which would enable her to live like a civilised being in her own apartments and see far less of her husband than formerly.

Her complacency had been treated to a succession of shocks since her return; it had, in fact, finally gasped out its life; although it had left self-confidence behind to sit at the feet of her shrewd clear mind. She found a zest entirely new in bringing to his knees a man who had been her husband when she was too raw and conceited to appreciate him, who had developed into a personage, and who had conquered his mere maleness and put women out of his life: she had consulted a detective agency and convinced herself that her only rival was the mine. Ida was nothing if not practical. Before preparing for her siege she chose to know exactly where she stood. A rival of her sex would have demanded one sort of tactics; a mere mine and the quickened business instinct of a dreaming but outclassing brain, although she did not underrate their peculiar dead walls and buffers, exacted a different and more impersonal assault--at first.

Much that she had failed to understand in her young husband was clear to her now. His silences, his formidable powers of concentration, his habit of thinking out his purposes unto the smallest detail before verbal expression, his tendency to dream, combined with lightning processes of thought, were the indispensable allies of his peculiar gifts: she had talked with too many brilliant and active men during the past year, to say nothing of her daily association with Ora, for whose inherited and progressive intellect she had the highest respect, and her own development had been too positive, rapid, and normal, not to be fully aware that men born with the genius to conquer life were equipped with powerful imaginations that necessarily made them silent thinkers.

She had become intensely proud of her husband since her return, and his neglect, coupled with his scrupulous generosity, had stung her pride and aroused both desire and determination to recapture what she had lost. She had no great faith in her capacity for love; but not only was she fascinated by Gregory for the first time but she found him more worthy of her accomplished coquetry than any man she had met in Europe. She was firm in her resolve to repossess her husband, but not merely to satisfy that pride which was the evolution of a more primitive vanity; she felt a certain joyousness, a lilt of the spirit, at the thought of spending her life with him, of being the complete helpmate of such a man; even a disposition to dream, which was so new in her experience that she banished it with a frown. “If I let go like other fool women, I’ll make a grand mess of it,” was her characteristic reflection.

She was dressing for the dinner when she heard him enter the house. The parlour maid for once remembered her instructions, and led him up to his room, which was on the opposite side of the hall from his wife’s and at the extreme end. Her door was ajar, she heard his voice--whose depth and richness were decimated by the telephone--his light foot ascending the stair. For the moment she lost her breath, then with an angry jerk of the shoulders regained her poise, and, in tones careless enough to reassure any husband suddenly overwhelmed with the awkwardness of his position, called out:

“Good evening, Gregory. Hope you’ll find everything you want in your room. Ring if you don’t. See you downstairs.”

“Oh--thanks!” Gregory swallowed an immense sigh of relief. “I’ll be on time.”

Ida, assisted by the “upstairs girl”--she had not yet found a ladies’ maid willing to come to Butte--continued her toilette. Her gown was as nearly Renaissance as she thought her native Northwest would stand at this stage of her social progress. It was “built”--a word more appropriate to woman’s dress A.D. 1600 than today--of heavy turquoise-blue brocade, the design outlined here and there with gold thread. The long wrinkled sleeves almost covered her hands, and, like the deep square of the neck, were tipped with fur. Her mass of blue-black hair was closely twisted around her head from brow to the nape of her neck, held above the low forehead by a jewelled stiletto Ora had given her in Genoa, “to remind her of her midnight diversions in the Renaissance palace over which her dim ancestral memories brooded.” This she had dismissed as damn nonsense, but she liked the stiletto with its rudely set stones, and had promised to wear it the first time she got inside one of her near-Renaissance gowns.

The pale subtle blue of the dress made her eyes look light and altogether blue, the thick black underlashes and full white underlids giving them an expression when in repose of cold voluptuousness. Her skin against the dark edge of fur was as white as warm new milk. Her costume and her regal air would have made her noticeable in the proudest assemblage. She was well aware that not only was she a very beautiful woman tonight but a dangerous one. And she might have stepped from one of the tarnished frames in the Palazzo Valdobia.

After the maid had been dismissed, she examined herself even more critically. The coral of lip and cheek, while still eloquent of youth and health, was more delicate than of old; all suggestion of buxomness had disappeared. She looked older than when she had left Butte; the casual observer would have given her thirty years; her cheeks were less full, her mouth had firmer lines; the cold grey-blue eyes more depth, justified their classic setting. Even her profile, released by the finer contour of cheek and thrown into high relief by the severe arrangement of her hair, contributed to the antique harmonies of her head and form.

“You’ll do,” she said to her image, and went down stairs.

Several guests arrived at once and she was standing before her antique English chimneypiece carved in California, chatting with three of them when Gregory entered the room. She nodded amiably as if they had met too recently for formalities. He took the cue and paused to exchange a few words with two men that stood near the door. But Ida had seen the startled opening of his narrow eyes which meant so much in him. She also noted that, as other guests came in, he looked at her again and again. In truth Gregory was startled almost out of his trained stolidity. He had known a certain side of Ida’s cleverness, and believed when he sent her abroad that she would make much of her opportunities, the greatest of which was her constant association with Ora Blake; but that she would return in less than a year looking the great lady, and the handsomest woman he had ever seen, even his energetic imagination had failed to consider. Magnetism, as of old, surrounded her like an aura, but to this he was insensible, his own magnetism having been caught and entangled with that of another. He felt very proud of his wife, however, and, with a sudden impulse of loyalty, he crossed the room and stood at her side. He also was prompted to say in a tone pitched to reach other ears:

“By George, you are simply stunning. I haven’t seen this--a--frock--dress--before.”

“Gown, my dear, gown. It only arrived a few days ago. I shall take you to Europe with me next time--”

“Take him soon!” said Mrs. Cameron. “Don’t give him time to wear out before he has begun to live. Our tired business men!”

“Next year!” said Ida, gayly. “He has half-promised and I’ll not let him off.” As she looked into his eyes with bright friendliness, his face relaxed with the smile which, she suddenly remembered, always had won her from anger or indifference. He was openly delighted with her, the more completely as he was both puzzled and relieved to see that those splendid eyes held neither cold anger nor feminine reproach. Moreover, although they softened for an instant before she was obliged to turn away, it was with an expression that made her look merely sweet and womanly, not in the least coquette or siren. Other guests claimed her attention. He heard her give a little hiss, and saw her eyes flash. Then he forgot her. Ora had entered the room.

Her gown, of some soft imponderable fabric that gave the impression of depth in colour, was the peculiar flaming blue of the night sky of Montana. Gregory was reminded instantly of the night they had sat on the steps of the School of Mines, with the pulsing sky so close above them. The upper part of the gown was cut in points that curved above her slight bust, the spaces between filled with snow-white chiffon which appeared to be folded softly about the body. She wore her pearls, but at the base of her slender throat was a closely fitting string of Montana sapphires, of the same hot almost angry blue. Her little head with its masses of soft ashen hair seemed to sway on the long stem-like neck, her stellar eyes blazed. Her costume extinguished every other blue in the room.

“Really!” said Mrs. Cameron, whose black eyes under her coronet of iron grey hair were snapping, “these two dear friends should have had a consultation over their costumes for tonight.” She had never liked Ora, and although, as the leader of Butte society, she made a point of speaking well of all whom she did not feel obliged to ignore, she had taken a deep liking to Ida; moreover, always a handsome woman herself, she felt both sympathetic and indignant. This was Ida’s night, and she scented treachery.

She had addressed her remark to Gregory, but although he looked at her politely he would not have heard thunder crashing on the roof. He wondered if he were standing erect; he had a confused impression that that wonderful blue gown was burning alcohol whose fumes were in his head and whose flames swirled through all his senses. And the woman within those curling blue flames was so much more beautiful than his memory of her that he forgot not only his recent tribute to Ida, but her bare existence until she tapped him sharply on the arm.

“Dinner has been announced,” she said. “You are to take in Mrs. Cameron.” Ida was smiling again; she had dismissed anger and annoyance; nothing was to dim the radiance of her spirits tonight. She and Ora would be at opposite ends of the table, and she could keep the length of the drawing-room between them when they returned.

Gregory’s face never betrayed him, particularly when he kept his eyelids down, and, as he shook hands with Ora in the dining-room he told her he was glad to see her again as casually as if his hand had not tingled to crush hers. He talked with Mrs. Cameron, however, as long as possible, but when her attention was claimed by the man on her right, he was obliged to turn to Ora. By this time his blood was still. Eating is commonplace work, and talking the inevitable platitudes of a dinner’s earlier courses will steady the most riotous pulses.

Ora smiled impersonally; her eyes might have beheld the husband of her friend for the first time.

“I am so glad to be able to ask you something about my mine,” she said. “Ida tells me that you have reopened it.”

“Yes, they are already through the fault and driving for the vein. There happened to be a good man here looking for a job when I got Mark’s telegram, a young engineer from the East, named Raymond. The miners are good capable men, too, and as Osborne and Douglas installed a compressor, the work should be pretty quick. I fancy you’ll recover the vein in a week or two.”

“I wonder if I shall? Mark thinks you infallible, but it seems too good to be true.”

“The vein is there, about a hundred feet down, but how rich it is I do not venture to predict.”

“Well, never mind,” Ora smiled happily. “I shall have the fun of looking for it, and I want to be with the men when they find it.”

“Oh--Ah--It really would be better for you to give up that idea of going out there to stay----”

“I thought I would give to you the opportunity to say that at once! Do go on and relieve your mind.”

“It is neither safe nor desirable,” he said sulkily. “I may have a row on my hands any minute. Your men and my men are a decent lot, but the Apex have employed a lot of scum so ignorant that there is no knowing what they may do in a crisis--in the hope of currying favour with their superiors. They would merely be made scapegoats or--canned--I beg pardon, fired--but they don’t know that, and they’re as hard a lot as Europe ever kicked on to our dump heap. Better stay here for the present.”

“I’ve sent out all the furniture for the bungalow, and Custer and a Chinaman to put it in order. I suppose my engineer can camp in the other cottage until it is finished. That is quite close to mine, I understand.”

“Oh, of course--but why not stay at my ranch house----”

“That is too far from the scene of operations. Please don’t bother about me. I should hate to think I was on your mind--you have enough! I shall be well protected, and I’ve even bought an automatic. I suppose being a born Westerner I should call it a gun. But it’s such a little one. I shall carry it always----”

“Yes, promise that.”

“I’ve even had a little bag made, like those they wore years ago, to fasten to my belt, and I shall keep it in that.”

“Very well.” He dismissed the subject. “I--ah--there’s something I heard today, but perhaps I should not speak of it. Only Mark is such an old friend of mine----”

“I suppose you saw Mr. Luning and he told you that we are to separate.”

“Yes, that is it.”

“I intend to live in Europe: I suppose you think that a callous reason.”

“It’s as good as most reasons for divorce in this country. When is Mark coming back?”

“Not for two months. Nothing will be done until then. I want to have my mining experience first and I shall leave Montana as soon as the papers are served.”

“Ah!”

Her partner claimed her at the moment and, his own still being occupied, he observed her furtively. He thought that she too looked older, but not because advantages had improved her; rather--he groped for the words that would give definiteness to his impression--as if some experience had saddened her. She had a softer expression. The blood rushed to his head and he almost choked with jealousy, his intuitions carrying him straight to the truth. “By God! She has loved some man,” he thought. Then he set his teeth. So much the better.

But when she turned to him again, he said impulsively, although his tones were light:

“You never did fit this Western life of ours. Of course you have found a more civilised mate in Europe?”

“You are all wrong,” she said gaily. “My only love at present is my mine. My mine! You should understand if anybody can.”

“Oh, yes, I understand that magnet. But I naturally thought----”

“What everybody else will think when the news is out. But I am astonished that you should jump at anything so commonplace.” Her heart was hammering under the concentrated intensity of his gaze; and as if he realised suddenly that he might be betraying himself he said sarcastically:

“As there are--I was told today--no less than six divorces pending in this set which my wife has the honour to entertain tonight, and as all are to intermarry, so to speak, when liberated, my conclusion in your case was probably due to the force of suggestion.”

“Well, I forgive you if you promise to believe none of the absurd stories you are sure to hear. I am in love with freedom. Now tell me what you think of Ida? Isn’t she wonderful?”

Gregory looked down the table at his wife sitting between the two most important men in Butte and entertaining both with animated dignity. She met his eyes and smiled brilliantly. She knew that he was proud of her; she had accomplished the second manœuvre in her flank attack: her first had been to put him at his ease.

“Yes,” he said to Ora. “She is. It is almost beyond belief. And she is your handiwork!” The two might have been life-long intimates, and Ida a mere kinswoman of both, so little did the oddity of this discussion occur to Gregory at least.

“And in a way my present to you.” Ora spoke with a charming graciousness. “Mark had given me a tremendous idea of your abilities. The day I met Ida I saw her possibilities, and I made up my mind then and there that when the world claimed you your wife should be not only an inspiration but equipped to render you the practical and social help that every rising man needs. Isn’t it splendid to think that she will always sit at the head of your table?”

Gregory was staring hard at her again. “You did that deliberately?” he asked.

“Yes. Deliberately. Ida is so clever that she was bound to develop with your rising fortunes, particularly if you sent her to Europe. But it would have taken longer. I couldn’t wait. My father inspired me with the deepest admiration and respect for our Western men. I had made up my mind that you were born into the front rank, and I wanted, as a Western woman, and my father’s daughter, to do something to help you. Tell me that you are satisfied and that you are as proud of Ida as she is of you--that--that--you simply adore her.” She did not flinch, and looked him straight in the eyes, her own full of young, almost gushing, enthusiasm. Her heart had almost stopped beating.

“I certainly am proud of her, and grateful to you. No doubt she will be very helpful if I am forced into politics to conserve my interests.” His tones were flat. He had come to his senses, and he was too loyal to hint that he no longer loved his wife: but Ora’s face was suddenly flooded with a lovely colour, and her eyes looked like grey mist through which the sun was bursting. She asked him,

“Aren’t you going to stay with us for a few days! We’d love to have you?”

“I take the 6.10 for Pony in the morning. If I disappear before the others it will be to snatch a few hours’ sleep in that gorgeous four-poster in my room. After living in two rooms for so long I am oppressed with all this magnificence----”

“Two rooms!” Ora’s voice rang out like an excited child’s. Gregory, marvelling at the quick transitions of her sex, thought he had never seen anyone look so happy. The gentle melancholy that had roused his jealousy was obliterated. “Two rooms!”

“There is another shack just beyond where my Chinaman cooks for me, and bunks, but I have only a bedroom and office--and a bathroom of sorts. Even my secretary sleeps at the ranch house.”

“You dear innocent millionaire. No doubt the proletariat, reading of your sudden wealth, and cursing you, pictures you wallowing in luxury. Well, you shall come and sit sometimes in my comfortable living-room. It is time you relearned the a, b, c, of comfort--before you relapse into the pioneer.”

“Your bungalow looks as if it could be made very homelike.” He spoke with unconscious wistfulness, and she raised friendly and impersonal eyes to his.

“You shall see. I have what the French call the gift of installation, and I have sent out nice things. I shall make tea for you when you come to the surface at the end of the afternoon shift, and you shall sit in the deepest of my chairs.”

“It sounds like heaven,” said Gregory, who despised tea.

Professor Becke, who had taken her in, and Mrs. Cameron simultaneously addressed their temporary partners, and Gregory was now to listen to an account, both spirited and kindly, of the admiration his wife had excited in her native town. Mrs. Cameron suspected the breach, in spite of the clever acting of both, and made up her mind to do what she could to bridge it. She had not an inkling of the cause, for, like Ida, she knew nothing of that fateful hour on the steps of the School of Mines; but as there was no gossip abroad about either Gregory or his wife, she inferred that it was one of those misunderstandings that so often separate young couples, always prone to take themselves too seriously. She knew that Gregory would value her praise; he not only had been fond of her as a schoolboy, when he spent an occasional Saturday with her son, but he knew that her experience of the world was very wide. She was a woman whom long years of wealth had enabled to travel extensively, she visited intimately at some of the greatest country homes in Europe, and she had her own position in New York. She subtly made Gregory feel prouder still of Ida, and then said teasingly:

“It is well that you have her devotion. I know of three men that are quite off their heads about her----”

“Ah? Who are they?” A sultan may weary of his sultana, but his sultana she is all the same.

“That I’ll not tell you. Even your wife could not, I fancy. I’ve never seen a woman treat men with a more careless impartiality. What a relief--with all these divorces pending. Merely a shuffling of cards, too, I understand. It is disgusting. I asked your wife as a personal favour to me to invite none of them tonight. Butte either has long orgies of respectability or goes quite off her head.”

“My wife is singularly indifferent to men for a beautiful woman,” replied Gregory, comfortably ignorant of his beautiful wife’s depredations abroad. “Nor is she likely to countenance divorce. She has a good deal of her old New England mother in her.” He had a haughty contempt for explanations as a rule, but his quick instinct had caught the significance of his companion’s remarks; knowing that Ida must wish to stand well with this amiable but rigid arbiter of Butte’s court of last resort, he added:

“I am sorry not to be in Butte oftener, and give her what little assistance a man may, but it is all I can do to leave the mine for a few hours every week or two.”

“That is the fate of too many of our American women married to our too busy American men. But--well--Gregory--I have married sons and daughters, and I am an old friend of yours. Young wives must not be neglected, and resentment eats like a cancer until women are old enough to be philosophical. Just think that over.” And before he could answer Ida gave the signal and the men were left alone.

VIII

As the women dispersed about the long drawing-room Ora laid her arm lightly round the waist of Ida, who was standing for the moment apart.

“Your dinner is a tremendous success, my dear,” she said, “and so are you. That gown! It makes mine look so crude. I wish I had worn white as I intended until the last minute. How splendidly everything went off. Not a detail to criticise, and every woman has worn something new from New York or Paris. But you--well, Ida, you are always beautiful, of course, but tonight you are something more than lovely.”

“Oh, am I?” Ida gave a little gasp, forgetting her passing astonishment at so much tribute from Ora at once. “Well, I ought to be. I never felt quite like this in all my life. Geewhil--no, I’m too happy even for slang. I wish I could sing.”

Ora sighed. “I’ve always known you would get everything you wanted, and I can guess just how you feel tonight. You are a complete success. How many people ever are able to say that?”

“Yes, I feel as if I owned the earth!” But her brows met in a puzzled frown. “I never felt, though, as if even the conquest of Butte would all but send me off my head. I never feel very much excited about any old thing; it’s not my make; but I’ve got a sort of shiver inside of me, and a watery feeling in the heart region. If that chef had spoilt the dinner I’d have gone out and wrung his neck.”

“Well, nothing can go wrong now. The worst is over, and no dinner was ever more delicious. Why don’t you let them dance? I know that Mrs. O’Hara plays.”

“Good idea! I’ll ring this minute for a few of those extra near-waiters to take out the rugs and move the furniture.”

Two of the younger women, who had returned not long since from San Francisco, were showing their scandalised friends the turkey-trot when the men came down the hall from the dining-room. Ida drew Gregory aside.

“Tell me,” she asked, with an eager almost childish note in her voice new to him. “Did it go off well? Am I all I ought to be after all the money you have spent on me? Do I look nice in my fine clothes?”

Gregory patted her on the shoulder. “I know little about such things,” he said kindly, “but it outclassed all the banquets I’ve been obliged to attend in the last six or eight months. I felt quite proud that it was in my own house--yours, to be literal--and Mrs. Blake assured me that she had never seen anything better done.”

“Ora is an angel, and without her--but you know all that. Tell me--well, Gregory, I want a good old-fashioned compliment!”

His voice lost its bantering tone and became formal with gallantry: “You are, as ever, the handsomest woman in Montana. I shouldn’t wonder a bit if those New York reporters were right and that you are the handsomest woman in America.”

Ida looked for a long moment into his eyes. Again her brows met in a puzzled frown, this time because her singular lightness of spirit had fled abruptly. She was too proud, too far developed beyond the old Ida, to put forth the arts of the siren until they were alone; but she asked softly, and again with that almost childish naïveté:

“Do you really admire me?”

“You are all right,” he said with a heartiness that masked a sudden misgiving. “I must come in and take you to the theatre the next time a good show comes to town. Let me know. I’ll gratify my vanity by sitting beside you in a box----”

“There’s a play tomorrow night. Stay over!”

“I’m sorry. I don’t dare. Apex is sinking for all she’s worth. We may have a set-to any minute. It was a risk even to come away for a night.”

“Oh, do let me go out, and down into the mine----”

“I should think not. And do your best to keep Mrs. Blake in Butte for at least a week.”

“Well, let me go out when the danger is over. I long to see chalcopyrite in the vein. I saw some beautiful specimens at the School of Mines the other day. It looks like pure gold.”

He looked at her in amazement. “What on earth do you know about ores? Did you include Freiberg in your itinerary?”

“This is Butte, remember. I no sooner returned than I realised how interesting she was.”

“Ah, well, when this affair is settled, come out and stay with Mrs. Blake and I’ll take you down. I’ve no place to put you up. Even the ranch house is full. Mrs. Blake’s manager and foreman are boarding there at present, and Oakley also puts up my secretary----”

“And those crops Oakley put in with such enthusiasm?” cried Ida with a sudden inspiration, and racking her memory. “Did they turn out as he expected? Was there a drought--in--in--those states?”

“What a memory you have! Yes, Oakley is doing wonders, and the drought arrived as per schedule. He would scorn to put the ranch under the ditch, although that is my long suit at present.”

“I suppose Circle-G Ranch looks like Holland by this time.”

“Not quite yet! But the work is progressing splendidly, all except----” He paused. It had never been his habit to talk to her, and the complicated details of business he regarded as beyond the intelligent apprehension of any woman. But as Ida moved closer to him with wide-open eyes she looked intelligent enough to understand anything, and a letter received that morning had been on his mind ever since. “There is some trouble about the railroad,” he said. “The Land Company was to build it, but either doesn’t want the bother or really has lost a lot of money, as it claims. I placed a deed in escrow which pledges me to build it if the Land Company failed to keep its agreement; and the seed houses, which bought several large blocks of land, and a number of private settlers are demanding that the railroad be begun--it was to be finished at the end of a year----”

Ida saw her opportunity and grasped it. “We both must do our duty, and not monopolise each other,” she said hurriedly. “But tell me all about it after they have gone. Now, go and dance with Kitty Collier. She’s the best-looking woman in Butte. I can’t dance in this harness, but I’ll talk English politics with my portlier guests.” As he smiled and moved toward the music, she laid her hand lightly on his arm. “I want to thank you for coming tonight, Gregory,” she said. “It means a great deal to me socially. Besides, it is good to see you again.” And this time she looked very sweet; but there was a slight aloofness in her manner, as if to admonish him that, although he was forgiven, there was still a breach which it was for him to close. Then she added lightly: “Well, we’ll talk it all over later. Go, now, and dance.”

* * * * *

Gregory stood by the front door talking to two of the men, whose wives had walked on; their homes were but a door or two away. Ida ran up the stairs to Ora’s room, where they unhooked each other.

“You look tired,” said Ida, sympathetically.

“Oh, I am tired,” replied Ora, her arms hanging. “Tired. Tired.”

“It’s a long while since you danced like that. Just drop into bed. Lend me a scarf, will you?”

She covered her opened gown with the lace and walked slowly over to her room. Then she suddenly turned back to the head of the stairs. The three men were still talking below.

“Gregory,” she called, and her voice was very sweet.

“Yes?”

“Lock up, will you? The servants have gone to bed.”

“I will.”

“Don’t forget,” and omitting to add a good-night, she went swiftly to her room, changed her formal evening gown for a soft combination of yellow silk and lace that made her look like a tulip in a primrose bed, let down the black masses of her hair, and threw herself into a deep chair. But there was no repose in her attitude. More than once her body stiffened and she raised her head. Pride and shrewdness forbade her to leave her door open, and it would be impossible to hear that light panther-like tread on the heavy carpet of the stair. The front door might have closed while she was changing in the dressing-room.

Suddenly she heard it slam. Nervous as she was she smiled reminiscently. Gregory might be soft of foot, but otherwise he was as noisy as most men. Then the smile froze until her lips were distended in a grin. Another door had slammed. Gregory was in his own room.

After a few moments she became aware that her body was rigid and that she was grasping the arms of her chair. She rose with an exclamation of impatience, but stood with her head bent, listening intently. Suddenly she swayed a little, once more flooded with that sense of excited gladness with which guests and chefs had had naught to do: she thought she heard a door open softly, a light footfall. But her straining ear-drums had deceived her. The house was as still as a mausoleum. She pressed her hands against her breast in the gesture the stage has borrowed from life; her heart felt as if swimming against an undertow.

Then she began pacing up and down. After her habit she tried to arrange her thoughts by putting them into words, and, as people still do off the stage, muttered them aloud.

“My God! Do I care as much as that? Do I really _care_? No! No! No! Any woman of pride, let alone vanity, would make up her mind to bring her husband back--especially if she could make him as proud of her as I made him of me tonight. And when he still thinks me beautiful. What woman wouldn’t? Even if she didn’t have an ounce of any kind of feeling for him? Men are only interesting when they forget about us in that purely masculine world where women are warned off the grass. To lure them back--that is the spice of life in this country. And if one doesn’t succeed the first time--he may be so tired and sleepy that he’s forgotten about me--or shy, afraid I’d laugh at him--the world does not come to an end tonight--What an idiot I am! I made him admire me more than ever, astonished him--why am I not satisfied for the present?--It can’t be that I care--that I long for him to come--Good God! I’d rather be dead than _that_!”

But she went to the door and, laying her ear against it, listened until she became aware that her lungs were bursting with imprisoned breath. Then she sank into a chair trembling, her eyes filled with fear. A moment more and she flung her arms over the table and dropped her face upon them and broke into heavy weeping.

IX

Ora looked round the large living-room of her bungalow with a deep sense of content. The walls were covered with a material coarse in weave and of a red warm but not too bright. The colour was repeated in the divan and chairs, melting softly into browns that harmonised with the heavy beams of the ceiling. A few Navajo rugs covered the floor. Above the divan of many cushions was a bookshelf crowded with the new fiction of two continents. Several shelves, built like a bookcase, occupied a corner and were furnished more ponderously. In the middle of the room a large table was half covered with the best periodicals of the day, although there was room for a large lamp with a red shade and a vase filled with wild flowers. Down at the far end of the room, which was about thirty feet long, and opposite the kitchen, were the dining-table and a small sideboard. The main door opened upon a verandah, and one beside the fireplace into a narrow hall, giving privacy to the bedrooms. Ora had no atavistic yearnings for the life of the pioneer; she might feel as much at home in a bungalow as in a palace, but elementals, save when pictorially valuable, like overhead beams, were rigidly excluded.

Her hands clasped behind her, she drifted up and down the long room, her mode of ambulation expressing the state of her mind. Quick and final as she could be in decision, if necessity spurred, the deeper sensuousness in her nature impelled her to drift whenever circumstances would permit. For two months she intended to drift--or gamble! She had not come out here further to alienate the affections of her friend’s husband, and those old tumultuous dreams were still crowded in some remote brain cell with seals on the door. She had even told herself in so many words that she had no desire for anything so terrific as their complete materialisation. She had plumbed the depth and intensity of life in her imagination. Let that suffice. And reality was not so much to be feared because of the wreck it might make of her life as because it was reasonably sure to leave a corpse in her memory, instead of that ever burning soul of past delights.

But she had come out to her mine to enjoy the constant companionship of Gregory Compton before she left her country for ever and married a European. That much she owed to the extraordinary imaginative experience in which they had been one. If she could spend long hours with him, make him as eager for her companionship as she was for his, forget his mine now and then, feel that mysterious and satisfying bond of the spirit, she would ask no more, not even an admission of love when they parted.

When a woman goes on a still hunt for a man’s soul she is far more dangerous than the obvious siren, for her self-delusion is complete, her guards are down, her wiles disarming. Ora had had too little practical experience of men to be prepared to admit, in spite of her abstract knowledge of life, that there has been but one foundation of love since the world began, and never will be another till life on this planet ends, whatever may be the starry mysteries of the spheres. But while she was (spasmodically) too honest to deny even her own sex encumbrance, she believed, like many other, particularly American women of narrow experience, that it had been politely emasculated by the higher civilisation, was merely synonymous with poetry, romance, and sentiment. This convention was imported to the New World by England’s middle-class and became a convenient national superstition. It is on the wane.

That Gregory, granted she were successful in capturing his soul, might desire to contribute the rest of himself to the spoils, now that she no longer was the wife of his friend, let loose those subversive passions she had divined the night of their meeting and dared to recognise in the realm of imagination, she would have refused to admit had the possibility occurred to her. She was out for the ideal, and not yet had she learned to take her imagination in hand like a refractory child. Moreover, she had an imperious will, gracefully as she concealed it. This last year of freedom and wealth and feminine triumphs had tempered that will into a pliable and dangerous weapon. What she wanted she would have. As she planned a thing so should it work out. But the details--ah, they were veiled in the future, and from their mysteries came this reflex vibration, this pleasant sense of drifting, of wondering how it would all begin and what would happen next.

In a sense it had begun. Gregory had called two days before to ask if she were comfortable. He was in his overalls (purposely), and had refused at first to sit down, but finally had succumbed to the deepest of the chairs before the log fire. He had finished by remaining for supper, and again had occupied the chair until eleven o’clock. Neither had suspected the other’s secret passion, for love before union, being nine parts imagination, needs solitude for indulgence, and is capable, moreover, of long and satisfying quietudes if fed with externals. There was sheer delight in sitting together by that warm intimate fire, at the dining-table at the end of the long shadowy room, in feeling cut off from the world on the edge of that rough mountain camp, in listening to the soughing of the pines during the silences. That both were on their guard lest the other take fright and the experience be impossible of repetition but exaggerated the atmosphere of friendliness, of almost sexless comradeship. Gregory betrayed one only of his reflections: he admitted to himself what Ora subtly compelled him to admit, and had no difficulty in divining, that the companionship of woman was a blessed thing, and that he had been the loneliest of men.

Their talk was mainly of ores! She was permitted to learn how little else interested him in comparison with the enthralling inside of Montana. But he told her also the legends of the great copper mines on Lake Superior, so old that copper was found pure, looking much like the smelted product from the copper ores of the later geological formations of the Rocky Mountains. These vast mines, particularly that on Isle Royal, bore unmistakable signs of having been worked systematically by a prehistoric people experienced in mining; presumably by the Atlantans, who, after their own mines were worked out and they still demanded “orichalcum” for their monuments and bronze for their implements, went annually in ships for the metal. That there had been a self-supporting mining colony on Isle Royal was indicated by certain agricultural remains.

Gregory and Ora had amused themselves reconstructing that old time when the metal island was as lively as today, and considerably more picturesque--owing to the alternative of skins for muck-spattered overalls; an underground chapter of the Niebelungenlied, its gnomes toiling down in those two miles of workings, stoping out less in a hundred years than the methods of today force a mine to yield in one. How they must have swarmed to the surface, regardless of discipline, at the first signal of the approaching ships, their one link with a world that was not all water and forest and underground cavern. By what tortuous way did those archaic ships travel from the Atlantic to the northwest corner of that vast inland sheet; unless, indeed, which is likely, subsequent upheavals have destroyed a waterway which may have connected sea and lake prior to 10000 B.C.[B] How many of those old ships lie in the bed of Lake Superior, laden with rude nuggets of copper, pounded from the gangue, or, who knows? smelted by a lost art into sheets and blocks? Archaic ships rode high, and no doubt those from Atlantis were overladen; for what has kept Atlantis in the realm of myth so long save the unscientific legend that she perished of greed and its vicious offspring? What archaic mysteries may not the terrible storms of that great north lake yet uncover? What strange variety of copper, washed and bitten by the waters of twelve thousand years, for which the enraptured geologist must find a new name? Who knows?--the bed of Lake Superior may be one unbroken floor of malachite; and the North American Indian of that region the descendant of those ancient miners, abandoned and forgotten when Atlantis plunged to the bottom of the sea.

It was Ora who advanced these last frivolous theories, and--the clock striking eleven--Gregory sprang to his feet.

“Likely as any,” he said. “All theories change about as often as it is time to get out a new edition of an encyclopædia, or develop a ‘new school’ which makes its reputation by the short cut of upsetting the solemn conclusions of its predecessors. I’m going down into the mine.” He bolted out with no further ceremony, but Ora was long since accustomed to the manners of Western men. She went to bed feeling that sadness had gone out of the world.

She had not seen him since. Nor had anything new and interesting happened. Her manager, Raymond, refused to take her down in the mine, alleging that when Apex broke into the workings of Perch of the Devil, there was sure to be a fight, and the bohunks would retreat, not up their own shaft but through the tunnels of the Primo mine. The young man was manifestly distressed to refuse any boon to so charming a woman, and he and his foreman had moved at once into the half-finished cottage, but he heartily wished her back in Butte, nevertheless. The best of miners love a fight, and it would be impossible to protect her from flying bullets if the row was continued above ground. Ora merely had laughed when he begged her to return or to remain within doors, but had promised to be prudent and flourished her automatic .25.

X

She glanced at the clock. It was half-past three. She knew that Gregory frequently went below in the morning, and had half expected that he would cross over to her hill for a moment when he came up at three o’clock. The drifting mood vanished. She decided that two days were enough for feminine passivity and went to her bedroom and changed her pretty house frock for a stout out-of-doors’ costume of forest green tweed: as she had no mind to look either the outworn Western heroine of romance, or a fright, she had omitted khaki from her mountain wardrobe. She tied a light green veil round her head, put on a pair of loose chamois gloves, selected a green parasol lined with pink, and went out to give the fates a gentle shove.

Hitherto she had so far yielded to the solicitude of her manager as to take her walks through the pine woods above her bungalow, but today she marched deliberately through her grove and stood for several moments on the edge of the little bluff above the tableland on which her claim was located. It was her first prolonged look at the three mining camps, for she had arrived at night. She had driven out occasionally to mining camps with her father, once or twice with Mark; the scene was both typical and picturesquely ugly. In or near the centre of each claim was the shaft house; fifty feet beyond--the distance prescribed by law to prevent overhead fires from communicating with underground timbers--were the buildings containing the hoisting machinery and the compressed air plant. Scattered about were the shacks of the miners, the long bunk- and mess-houses, blacksmith and carpenter shops. Just below the Apex claim, and on Government land, an enterprising publican had established himself. On all sides were other claims of recent location, for there had been the inevitable rush.

The rude buildings were grey and weather-beaten, and all traces of the gentle spring verdure had disappeared. About the collar of each shaft was an immense dump heap, waste rock brought up from the depths, and the highest of these was on Perch of the Devil. Near each were the ore bins, but these for the most part were empty, and, save on the De Smet hill, there was a notable absence of “double-sixes.” The Primo vein had not been recovered, Apex had not yet touched bottom; Gregory Compton, for reasons best known to himself, had changed his original plan and was merely uncovering his new vein, taking out as little of its ore as possible. His bins were furnished with ore from the second level of his mine, where work had proceeded steadily on the original vein.

The men off shift were standing about in groups as they did in Butte, or passing in and out of the saloon. And the racket was deafening: the roar of the machinery in the hoisting and compressor houses, the crash of rock dumped from the buckets or skips, the ringing of hammer on anvil. The scene was not beautiful but it was alive! One could fancy the thrill of the hidden metals, knowing that their hour, after vast geological ages of waiting, was come; that, like mortals, they were to agonise in the crucible of life and achieve their ultimate destiny.

Ora walked through the grove until she was beyond the long mess-house at the back of her claim, climbed over the abrupt rise of Apex--which, combined with the hardness of the rock, had made its task so long--and, ascertaining that the larger buildings hid her, crawled under the De Smet fence, and drew a long breath as she set her feet squarely on the famous Perch of the Devil. Here the buildings, large and small, were scattered up to the brow of the hill and over on the other side. It had, in fact, something of the appearance of a growing village with irregular streets; and before several of the cabins children were playing, or women took their Monday washing from the line. The fronts of some of these cottages were painted white, and here and there flowers grew in boxes. There were even a reading-room and a large “general store.” Altogether Perch of the Devil looked as if it might grow larger, and more solid and permanent of aspect, with the years.

Ora walked through the crooked streets on the steep hillside until she reached the deep chamber into which had leached the acids of the centuries to enrich the ores, and incidentally Gregory Compton. Thousands of tons of dump made a hill in itself and shut off the view to the south, but below were the acres of waving wheat, the alfalfa with its purple flower, the sprouting flax, the winding creek that was often dry but sometimes wet, the brush sheds for the cattle, the substantial farm buildings. The broad peaceful expanse looked as if even a winter wind had never shaken it, so entirely did it seem dissociated from the frantic energies of its northeast corner. And still beyond was perfect beauty: the massive pine-covered mountains, rising tier above tier, ridges of the great Rockies, far away and up to the sky-cutting line, glittering with eternal snows. For a few moments Ora forgot the raucous noises about her, Nature delivering herself of her precious children with loud protesting pains. Then she turned suddenly and looked upward.

Gregory had just stepped from his cabin. For a moment he did not see her, but stood staring, his hands in his pockets, at the distant mountains. He wore his favourite overalls and a battered cap on the back of his head; but he looked so remote in spirit from that materialising costume that Ora watched him with a sensation of helpless jealousy. Not for a moment could she delude herself that he was thinking of her. He looked like a seer.

“Can you see right into the heart of those mountains?” she asked lightly, as she walked up the hill toward him. “You looked as if your imagination were ‘blocking out’ thousands of tons of gold quartz.”

He started and coloured, but smiled with a sudden pleasure at the charming picture in the foreground. “Something like that. This mine is all right, and now that I’ve got over my disappointment, I have a feeling for it that I guess I’ll never have for another mine--something like the affection for one’s first born! But all the same I intend to have a gold mine one of these days. Have you been admiring my view?”

He had walked down and joined her.

“Yes, but that is not what I came over here for. Nor is it what I came out to the mines for. I brought a small library, but I find I am not in the humour for books. I want to be doing something myself. Mr. Raymond won’t take me down into my mine. I want to go down into yours--now.”

He hesitated a moment. “Well--why not? Apex is not working this afternoon--something the matter with their compressor. They sounded pretty close to our workings this morning, but the men quit about one o’clock, and as they didn’t blast it was probably because the holes weren’t deep enough. I’ve just been told that they can’t get to work again before tomorrow. But you look much too fine!”

“Everything cleans; and I’ll leave my veil and parasol in the shaft house.”

“All right,” he said abruptly. “Come along.”

When they were in the shaft house he asked, “Will you go down in the skip or by the ladder?”

“Oh, I couldn’t possibly do anything so ignominious as to go down in a bucket, and I’m very agile. How far is it?”

“A hundred feet. I shall only take you to the first level.”

Ora peered down into the black and slanting and apparently bottomless well. A ladder was built flat against one side. A skip full of ore was banging against the sides of the other compartment on its way up. She looked again at the ladder, shuddered, and set her teeth.

Gregory put two candles in his pocket, inserted his long limber body into the narrow aperture and ran down sideways.

“Oh!” gasped Ora. “I can’t do that. Please wait. I--I think I’d better go down backward.”

“By all means. Sit down and turn round. I’ll catch hold of one of your feet and put it on a rung. The rest will be easy.”

Ora followed these instructions gingerly, concluding that the skip would have been more dignified. Then she forgot dignity and only wondered if her bones had gone out of her: she had rolled over on her equatorial zone and was kicking helplessly in the void. But as Gregory caught her feet and planted them safely she set her teeth once more and summoned her pride.

“Glad you have on stout boots,” he said, practically. “We’ve not enough water in the mine for pumps, but it’s a little damp underfoot. Wait a minute while I light a candle.” He struck a match and performed this feat; how, Ora could not even guess; but she glanced down sideways and saw that he was holding the lighted candle up at arm’s length.

“Come on,” he said. “You mustn’t be frightened.”

“I’m not a bit frightened, but don’t go too fast.”

Gregory, who was running down the ladder, moderated his pace, and sent up an occasional word of cheer. Suddenly Ora heard a horrid noise below like the crash and roar of an express train. “Has the mine fallen in?” she gasped.

“Hope not. That’s the tram with ore and rock for the skip. By and by we’ll use the waste rock to fill up the stopes with, but we’re only blocking out at present.”

“How frightfully interesting mining is--in all its details!” Ora’s hands were smarting, and every part of her, not excluding her imagination, felt as if on the rack. “That noise is over!”

“Did I hear you say ‘Thank heaven’?”

“Of course not. How much farther is it? Haven’t we passed the first level?”

“If we had I should be carrying you. Only about twenty feet more.”

And a few moments later, with the deepest sigh of relief she had ever drawn, she was standing in the small station beside the shaft.

“It’s hard work the first time,” he said sympathetically. “But you’ll soon get used to it.”

“How dark it is!”

“I’ll put in electricity when my troubles with Amalgamated are over.” He lit another candle and handed it to her. “Be careful of your frock.”

The ore car was rumbling away in the distance. Gregory followed the sound down the tunnel and Ora kept close at his heels. “I suppose we’ll see something after a while?” she ventured. “I can’t see even you now, only your candle.”

“We’ll soon be out of this,” he said cheerfully. “You see, we’ve had to walk under the chamber from which I took that great deposit of carbonates, and then some----” He paused a moment, but not before he had turned acutely to the left. “This is where I lost the vein. We are in the fault now. How would you like to be in an earthquake that broke a vein in two and hurled one end----” His voice was lost in the rattling roar of the compressed air drills, although there was nothing to be seen until they reached another little station and faced a wider drift on the right, some twelve feet long. Candles were flaring from the miners’ candlesticks, whose long points were thrust into stulls or the softer part of the rock, and four men were manipulating two of the cumbersome air drills which stood on tripods. Gregory made a sign to the shift boss, who shut off a valve, and the din stopped abruptly.

“Now,” said Gregory. “This is what you have come for.” He moved his candle along the brassy glitter of chalcopyrite in the vein, steadying her with his arm, for the floor was uneven and littered.

Ora trembled. She forgot the arm about her; it felt like mere steel for that matter; she was in one of the magic caverns of her dreams and she thrilled to the magnet of the ores. “It looks like pure gold,” she whispered.

“So it is in a sense, and far more beautiful to look at in the vein.” They had been standing near the opening of the drift. He guided her down toward the farther end; the miners made way for them and went out to the station nothing loath; owing their lives to what has cost many a man his life and more, the caprice of a woman.

“I want to show you how the holes look before we put the sticks of powder in,” Gregory began, as he waved his candle once more aloft, this time over a less dazzling surface. He stopped abruptly. She felt his body stiffen. Then, as he whirled her about, he screamed to the men:

“Get out! Run!”

Ora had the sensation of being swept along by a bar of steel burrowing into the flesh of her waist. But in another instant she had lost all sense of her body. There was a shock as if something had hit the hill at its foundations, a dull roar, and then the crash of falling rock behind them.

The men were all ahead. Ora dimly could see them running like rabbits up the fault drift. Then she became conscious of the stifling sickening smell of powder and a bursting sensation in her head. No one paused for a second, nor drew breath until all had turned the corner and were in the main level. For a space nothing was heard but the hoarse effort to refill tormented lungs. The men leaned against the walls of the tunnel. Ora leaned against Gregory. All sense of fear had departed out of her. She had had her baptism of fire and doubted if she ever should be capable of the sensation of fear again.

The silence lasted but a moment. Out of the intense darkness flew oaths like red-hot rocks from boiling craters.

“Shut up!” said Gregory sharply. “There’s a lady here. And light up if you have any extra candles. I’ve dropped mine. We must find out if anybody is missing.”

“I held on to mine,” said Ora proudly. Gregory lit it, and the shift boss counted his men. “All here, sir; but by jink, it was a narrow squeak. The--the--the----”

“Never mind--who’s this?” A man was running toward them from the direction of the shaft.

“It’s me, sir.” Gregory recognised Mann’s voice. “I’ve just got on to what they were up to. There wasn’t a blamed thing the matter with the compressor. They just meant to catch us off guard--anybody hurt?”

“All right. How did you find out?”

“I suspicioned something crooked, so I got one of those damned bohunks drunk and bribed him. They’d put in the sticks before they quit, pretending the compressor had gone wrong and they couldn’t finish drilling. I suppose they sneaked back while I was getting the story, and lit the fuses.”

“You’ll let us get back at ’em, boss?” demanded the men.

“Oh, yes,” said Gregory, in a voice of deadly irony. “We’ll get back at them.”

He was holding the candle. Ora saw him bend his head forward in the attitude so characteristic of him. But he raised it in a moment.

“Go up, every one of you,” he said, “and down to the saloon. Talk about what happened, but assume that it was an accident. Any fighting above ground and you’ll be canned. Say that there’s a big cave-in and we’re obliged to quit work on this level for the present. See that that spreads all over Apex camp. Say that I’ve given you the rest of the shift off. Come down as soon as you’ve had your drink and said your say. Jerry”--to the shift boss--“you watch the Apex shaft house. I don’t figure that they’ll go down under an hour, on account of the smoke, but if they do just drop below. I’ll wait for you here. And before you come,” he added grimly, “go over to the compressor house and tell them to turn the steam on the air line.”

“Hooray!” The shouting of the men made almost as much noise in the tunnel as the recent explosion. “That’s the ticket, boss. Oh, we won’t do a thing to them!”

“Get out of this,” said the shift boss. “Don’t take more than one drink; and hold on to your tempers, or there’ll be no fun below.”

A moment later Gregory and Ora were alone in the tunnel.

XI

“How did you guess?” asked Ora.

“I didn’t guess. I saw a drill hole just beyond where my men were working. I also did a little quick deduction. Miners blast just before they go off shift. The afternoon change of shift is at three o’clock. As I told you I had seen the Apex men come up about one o’clock when their compressor stopped. That hole not only told me that they were closer than we had thought, but that they were up to devilment. I guessed that they had timed to blast just before we were ready to drill at that point. Were you very much frightened?”

“I didn’t like it.” Ora knew that bravery in woman makes no appeal to the lordly male. “But I hardly had time to think; and after all you left me nothing to do.”

“Well, you were game and didn’t scream or cry,” he conceded handsomely. “Let’s light up.”

They had walked as far as the station at the foot of the shaft. Gregory unlocked the door of a small cupboard, found two candles and inserted them in miners’ candlesticks that were stabbed into the walls. They flickered in the draft as a skip rattled up from the second level, but relieved the oppressive darkness.

“Why, your hair is down!” exclaimed Gregory.

Ora put up a hand. “So it is! Well--I am sure I never should know if my hair fell down at a good play, and ours was live drama. I’ll braid it and put on my veil up above.”

He watched her for a moment as she sat on a box braiding her long fair hair, vaguely recalling the legend of the Lorelei. He noticed that her eyes as she peered up at him looked green in that uncertain light. But in a moment his thoughts wandered from her. He folded his arms and stared downward.

Ora leaned back against the wall. She saw that he had forgotten her, but had made up her mind to accept him as he was; she had no more desire to dictate his moods than to read in advance the book of the next two months. There was the same pleasurably painful vibration in her nerves as on the night when she had piled stake upon stake at Monte Carlo. From that scene her thoughts travelled naturally to Valdobia and she suddenly laughed aloud.

“What are you laughing at?” demanded Gregory suspiciously.

“I was trying to imagine that we were imprisoned in the underground dungeon of an Italian palace in the middle ages.”

“Hard work, I should think. Although if we had a cave-in I guess the results would be about the same.”

“And you? Were you seeing your minerals winking three thousand feet below?”

He laughed then, and sat beside her. “At all events the mystery down there is more romantic than your mediæval dungeons--and so will the great underground caverns be when the ores have been taken out.”

“Pity the caverns--stopes!--have to be filled up with débris to prevent the mine caving in,” said Ora flippantly. “I went underground in Butte last week--to the eighteenth level of the Leonard. Nothing but endless streets and cross-alleys, all numbered----”

“And you didn’t find that interesting?” he asked indignantly. “To be a third of a mile below the surface of the earth and find it laid out like a city, with streets and rooms, and stations ten times as large as this, and lighted with electricity?”

“Yes, but the knowledge that you have a third of a mile of those streets and rooms--seventeen levels of them--on top of you, supported only by waste rock in the stopes, and timbers that are always snapping in two from the terrific pressure--timbermen working at every turn--‘Save YOURSELF’ the first thing you see when you leave that cage--Oh, well, I felt there was quite enough romance on top of the earth.”

“I am deeply disappointed in you. You told me once--why, even lately----”

“Oh, I haven’t changed the least little bit. Nothing in life,” and she looked at him with laughing eyes, “interests me as much at present as these two mines. But I am thankful that we are still within a reasonable distance of the surface. I am quite content to screw up my eyes and wander in fancy among the primary deposits close to the central fires. If I had a mine like yours, full of the beautiful copper ores instead of that hideous pyroxenite of mine, I should leave a glittering layer in every stope, support the roof with polished stone columns, light with hidden electric bulbs, and wander from one to the other imagining myself in Aladdin’s palace.”

“A fine practical miner you would make. It’s lucky that your mine is pyroxenite, not quartz. That is if you want to live in Europe.--Do you?”

“Of course. What have I in this part of the world? A mine cannot satisfy a woman for ever. I suppose you wouldn’t care if you never saw a woman again!”

“Oh!” He was looking hard at her.

“What else were you thinking of just now?” asked Ora, with that perverse desire to be superficial which so often possesses American women in decisive moments.

He sighed impatiently. “I’ve got a big job on my hands, one that will take me away from here more or less. Did Mark tell you of a land deal I put through?”

“I should think so!”

“Well, I’ve got to build that railroad. Apex will close down when it finds I won’t let its men work underground. Amalgamated’s next move will be to bring suit for apex rights, and get out an injunction to enjoin me from working on that vein until the case is decided. As soon as I have driven them out now, however, I must get to work on the railroad--find my engineers--Oh, there are too many details to bother you with. But it means that I must spend a good deal of time in Butte until the thing is started----”

“How delighted Ida will be!” interrupted Ora softly. “And that house will be so comfortable after your cabin.”

For a moment he did not speak. Nor did his face betray him; but she fancied that his muscles stiffened. He replied suavely: “I should have gone on to say that it is more likely I shall have to attend to the matter in Helena. That is the centre of the land interest. It is doubtful if I could find the sort of men I want in Butte.”

“Have you any other land schemes on hand?”

“Not at present.”

“What does that mean?”

“Well--when I have taken a couple more millions out of this hill I shall begin to buy land, put it under the ditch, build the short railroads that may be necessary, and sell to small farmers--in other words push along the colonisation of this state. I believe you gave me that idea--the night we talked Butte--the first time, I mean.”

“I thought you had forgotten that night altogether.”

“Forgotten it!” Ora’s heart stood still at the explicit vibration in his well-ordered voice. She leaned back and closed her eyes. He had loved her all these months, dreamed of her as she had dreamed of him. Her first sensation of wonder and delight was succeeded by a faint disappointment.

She had the instinct of the born huntress, although she was far too highly civilised to have recognised it before. She wondered if his capitulation meant her own deliverance, too ignorant in the ways of love to guess that whether this were a passing or a permanent phase depended on the man.

While Gregory hurried on to tell her of all he should be able to do for Montana with the millions at present locked in the vaults of his hill, she had a full moment of honesty, and confessed that she had come out here to make Gregory Compton love her. And he did! It was a mighty personality to conquer; and the victory had been won long since! But the disappointment passed in a cynical smile. That he had no intention of declaring himself her lover was as patent as his inhuman power of self-control. Here were barricades to storm if barricades she wanted? What difference? And did she?

He sprang to his feet and stood at the foot of the shaft, looking up.

“They’re coming down,” he said.

Joshua Mann emerged a moment later.

“Apex bunch being rounded up to go below,” he said. “Our men are on the way.”

“Steam on the air line?”

“You bet!”

“Let’s get to work.” He turned to Ora. “Stay here till I come back,” he said peremptorily. “I can’t take you up in the skip now.”

“I am quite comfortable,” said Ora, coolly. “How many men will come down?”

“Five.” And he and Mann disappeared into the tunnel.

Ora waited until the other men had descended one by one and run into the blackness. Then she dislodged one of the candlesticks from the wall and ran after them. When she reached the fault drift she thrust the long point of the candlestick into a stull before turning the corner. Then she crept toward the station, from which she could witness the punishment about to be inflicted upon the Apex men, whatever it might be.

There was a glimmer of light in the new drift. Ora saw the men binding a piece of hose to the same length of pipe. They attached the hose to the air line and held it just inside the ragged hole some twelve feet above.

There was a distant murmur of voices overhead and to the right. The solitary candle was extinguished. The murmur of voices in the drift which led from Apex shaft along the continuation of the Primo vein grew louder. Men were laughing. One man was giving orders. It appeared that they were to let themselves down and go systematically to work on the Perch vein, which was now driving under the Apex claim.

Ora heard a sharp whispered word: “Now!” and barely recognised Gregory’s voice. A second later and she was deafened by the roar and hiss of escaping steam, mingled with shrieks of agony above, and fiendish cat-calls and jeers below, all expressed in the spectacular profanity of the mining camp. The episode was over in a moment. The Apex men tumbled over one another in their anxiety to leave the scene, and those manifestly disabled--Ora could hear them gasping horribly as the steam was turned off abruptly--were dragged away. She felt her own way rapidly along the fault drift, snatched her candlestick from the wall as she turned the corner, and scampered back to the shaft station. When the men arrived she was sitting demurely on the box. Gregory evidently had telephoned from the other station, for the skip came rattling down just before his appearance at the head of his laughing, cursing column.

“Did it go off well?” asked Ora.

“Did it?” cried Mann, tossing his cap in the air.

“They’re settled for the moment,” said Gregory. “They’ll come back at us later with steam on their own air line, and slacked lime; but we’ll be ready for them. They stand no show.”

Two of the men had been left on watch. Gregory lifted Ora into the skip. He and Mann stood on the edge. A second more and Ora was holding her breath as they were hurtled upward at express speed, the metal car banging from side to side of the shaft. In something under three-quarters of a minute Gregory helped her to alight in the shaft house, while the skip descended for the miners.

“Well,” he said, smiling, as she lifted her braid to the top of her head and wound the veil about it, “have you supped full of sensations for one day?”

“The last was the worst! And I do mean the skip. Now that we are where you cannot beat me I will confess that I followed you and saw your neat little mediæval revenge from the station----”

“Hush!” Gregory glanced about apprehensively, and drew her outside. “You mustn’t tell anyone else that. You don’t want to be summoned to the witness stand, I suppose?”

Ora gasped. “I never thought of that.”

“When will women let men do their thinking?” Gregory looked the primeval male as he scowled down at her. Nor did he mitigate her alarms with the information that underground battles seldom were continued in the courts. “Now, I am going to take you to your cottage, and I want you to stay there until the trouble is over. The men are bound to get drunk and fight. Better go to Butte----”

“I won’t.”

“Very well, then, stay in your house.”

“And be bored to death? Besides. I need exercise. I’ll roam all over the place unless you promise to come to supper every night and then take me for a walk in the woods.”

His eyes flickered. “Perhaps your engineer----”

“He’s a mere child. I hate boys. And I must have exercise.”

He looked at her with apparent stolidity for another moment, but she knew that he was investigating her expressive orbs. They expressed nothing that could be construed as flirtation, coquetry, or personal interest in himself. He saw himself mirrored there merely as the friend of her husband and the husband of her friend. “Very well,” he said curtly and swung on his heel. “I suppose I must look out for you. Come along.”

XII

Gregory had worn a clean suit of overalls into the mine. He was now spattered from head to foot, including his face and hands, but he swung along beside Ora with an unconsciousness of his disreputable appearance that was quite superb. All the miners of the three camps’ off shift were gathered about the saloon. As Gregory appeared the greater number of these men cheered wildly, but the “dark men,” who stood apart, maintained an ominous silence.

“Aren’t you afraid they’ll take a shot at you some night?” asked Ora. “How they must hate you!”

“You don’t go into any business nowadays and put it over without running the risk of being shot by some sort of down-and-outer. What’s the sense in worrying? Unless I’m much mistaken we’ll be rid of that scum inside of twenty-four hours.”

And he was right. There was another battle underground, in which more of the Apex men were scalded, and the Perch men unhurt. Then the Apex men refused to work, and the mine closed. Gregory was shot at on the following night, and Joshua Mann was slightly wounded. Both the Perch and Primo men tumbled out of bed, hunted down the offenders, and chased them into Pony, riddling the air with shot and rending it with bloodthirsty yells. It would be some time before Apex would be able to hire miners of any nationality willing to trust themselves between the two belligerent camps. But bohunks--more recent importations--would return in the future, if any. These ignorant and friendless South Europeans can be killed for about two hundred dollars apiece, whereas it costs several thousands to kill an American, Cornishman, or Irishman, as he leaves behind him an equally intelligent family or friends. It was unlikely, in any case, that high class miners would “take a job” in the predatory Apex. They not only liked Gregory Compton because he was his own manager and worshipped by his miners, but because he possessed in overflowing measure the two qualities that the American in his heart of hearts respects most, luck and bluff.

Amalgamated immediately brought suit against Gregory Compton, charging not only that the faulted vein apexed in their claim, but that his original patent was agricultural and gave him no lateral rights in mining; furthermore, that a patented claim could not be repatented. This was a fine legal point and could impoverish several generations before it was decided.

Gregory paid no attention to this suit beyond issuing an invitation through the press to eight of the leading geologists of the United States and Canada to come to Montana at his expense and make a personal inspection of the two veins. If they did not agree that the vein on which he had been working, containing a shoot of chalcopyrite six feet wide, and of the highest grade, was the original vein, and the Primo-Apex a mere stringer, or at most a fork from his, he would let the suit go by default. The geologists promptly accepted, and it was agreed that they should all arrive in Butte on the second of June.

Once more Gregory Compton had scored. Scientific men are normally honest, although the great fees offered to geologists frequently infuse their judgment with that malleable quality peculiar to the lawyer under the subtle influence of his brief. But these men, all of high repute, would be too afraid of one another, and of the merciless newspaper men that would accompany them, to deliver aught but a just verdict. Gregory knew that Amalgamated was profoundly disconcerted, and that in the face of public opinion it was improbable that the suit ever would be brought into court. But they could devil him meanwhile, and he was enjoined from working on the recovered vein until the case should be decided. He accepted the injunction without protest and transferred the miners, whom he had kept hard at work blocking out until the last minute, down to the second level of the mine.

“They’ll get a jolt from that quarter, too,” said Gregory to Ora, and he was not referring to the miners. “They’ll go on fighting me for years, no doubt, but I’ll spring some sort of a facer on them every time. They may have more money, but I have enough.”

“You never feel afraid they may beat you in the end?”

“Beat me?” Gregory’s eyes glittered. “Not unless they bore a hole in my skull and introduce a microbe that will devour my brains. I can get ahead of them in more ways than one. Long before all the ore on the second level is stoped out I shall be in a position to put up my own reduction works if they freeze me out of Anaconda or Great Falls. If I ever go into politics it will be to fight for a state smelter.”

Ora looked at him speculatively. He was walking up and down her living-room with a swift gliding motion peculiar to him in certain moods; his head was a little bent as if his narrow concentrated gaze were following a trail.

“I believe you love the fight as much as any part of it,” she said.

“I do. And as soon as I’ve taken out money enough I’m going to buy a big tract of land, irrigate it, plant it in beets, put up a sugar refinery and fight the Havemeyer trust.”

“Why don’t you form a company, buy your beet land, and put up the factory now? You could raise all the money you wanted.”

“No companies or partners for me,” he said curtly. “What I’ll do I’ll do alone. I want no man’s help and no man’s money. And I certainly want no other man’s ideas interfering with mine.”

Ora sighed. He had been away for a week on his railroad and land business, and during this, their first meeting since his return, he had talked of nothing save his mine and the new possibilities of Circle-G Ranch. Investigation of the soil and timber values of the 35,000 acres which he had originally hypothecated as a guarantee that the railroad should be built, but which perforce had reverted to him when the Land Selling Company had failed to keep this part of their contract, would be worth, after proper transportation facilities were insured, not less than twenty-five dollars an acre. A member of the Land Selling Company whom he had taken with him had been convinced of this, and that the soil was peculiarly adapted to the raising of apples by intensive culture. As soon as the railroad was built there would be no difficulty in selling the timber and the rest of the land, and the Company had agreed to buy it. His profits would be $875,000, and the railroad would cost but $300,000.

No wonder, thought Ora, that a man with a business brain of that calibre had little place in it for woman. True, he had called her up once from Helena, evidently seized with a sudden desire to hear her voice, but he had been interrupted; and the only tangible result had been to keep her in such a fever of expectancy that she barely had left the house lest he call her up again and she miss him. He did not, and her nerves had become so ragged that she almost had hated him and obeyed the impulse to pack her trunks and flee to Europe. He had come to see her within an hour of his return, but, beyond his rare delightful smile and a hard pressure of the hand, he had manifestly been too absorbed to feel any personal appeal beyond her always welcome companionship.

And the next morning he telephoned that he was leaving for Butte. Ida had reminded him of his promise to appear in public with her. Mary Garden was to sing that night and she had taken a box. He had grumbled but finally agreed to go, as he had business in Butte which might as well be transacted that afternoon. Ida thanked him politely and promised him an interesting party at dinner. Then she called up Ora and invited her, but Ora declined on the plea of good taste; the story of her impending divorce was common property, and it was hardly decent for her to appear in public.

XIII

Reaction, after the emotional recognition of the subtle but certain change that had been wrought in her unsuspected depths, had filled Ida for many hours with a sullen rage against Gregory Compton and herself. But in a day or two the buoyancy of youth and the common sense, of which she possessed an uncommon store, asserted themselves, and, while devoting her time to the small daily distractions of society, her determination to win back her husband never waned for a moment. She knew that she must play the waiting game, keep a sharp eye out for the blessed opportunity and pounce upon it, but make no attempt to “rush things.”

The day after the Apex mine closed down, she rang him up and offered her congratulations, told him something of the excitement in Butte, then rang off before he began to feel detained. As he passed through Butte later, on his way to Helena, he could do no less than call on her, and, to his relief and her secret rage, he found several pleasant people taking tea in the library. But she showed her pride in him so frankly that he could not but be flattered, and talked so intelligently of the undoubted sequel of the battle underground that he forgot her guests and addressed his conversation to her. She drew him on to describe that grim but picturesque episode underground, and he would have been less than man had he failed to be sensible of the rise of his chest while surrounded by a breathless circle of charming women. When they were about to withdraw tactfully and leave him alone with his wife, he glanced at his watch, bade them all a hasty good-bye and bolted out to catch his train. Ida once more had been able to exhibit to her little world an evidence of the pleasant understanding between herself and her busy husband, and got what consolation out of this fact that she could.

“I can wait,” she thought grimly. “I can wait! I guess patience is my one all-wool-and-a-yard-wide virtue. I’ll wait!”

She gave several small dinners and a dancing party, devoted to the new excitement of “ragging,” in which no one became more proficient than herself. She “went” harder than ever, and even joined the more extreme younger set (elegantly known as “The Bunch”) one night in a progress among the road houses of The Flat, and danced in the ballroom of the Five Mile House until dawn. But she had no real taste for this side of life; and did penance by visiting the Poor Farm and several other charities under the wing of Mrs. Cameron. Her popularity on all sides was unchallenged, and not only was she firmly established in the city of her heart, but Mrs. Cameron had offered to take a house with her in New York for the following winter if she cared to mount still higher. She was gratified and grateful, but she was filled with that desperate loneliness that only a man can banish.

On the night of the opera she wore black velvet unrelieved and never had looked handsomer. The neck of the apparently inseverable gown was cut square, and her beautiful arms were exposed as far to the top as fashion permitted; she wore her hair banded closely about her head, and, at the base of her throat, a barbaric necklace of dull red and blue stones that she had picked up in an antiquity shop in Munich. As she sat in her box between Mrs. Cameron and Mrs. Collier, one of the handsomest and best dressed of the younger women of Butte, Gregory, who sat behind and facing the house, saw that during the first entr’acte the audience levelled its glasses at her constantly, and that, indisputably, she divided the honours of the night with the prima donna.

He looked at her more than once himself, her classic beauty, or the classic effect she made it produce, appealing to his æsthetic sense as beauty in any form always did. He wondered a little that it should so have lost its once irresistible appeal to his senses, wondered again if he could not still have loved her well enough to live with had Ora never entered his life. Certainly he was very proud of her, and her conversation as well as her personality interested him. He respected her profoundly for what she had achieved, giving her full credit for the revolution in appearance, manners, and speech, in spite of her exceptional opportunities. Then he forgot her as his thoughts wandered to Ora, whom he saw sitting alone in her warm shadowy room, in which he had come to feel so much at home. As he always went to her when he was tired, after a day filled with excitement or hard physical labour, he experienced only peace and content in her nearness; but when away, as tonight, and with the music of Thaïs singing into his keen responsive nerves, he was filled with an inexpressible longing.

He was roused by a faint exclamation from Ida. She was leaning forward. A moment later a man, whom he had never seen before and who looked like an Englishman of distinction, silently entered the box. Ida left her chair, and gave him both her hands in greeting, then went with him out into the passageway where their conversation would not interfere with her guests’ enjoyment of the music.

Gregory felt very much like any other husband at that moment. He was conscious of no sting of jealousy, or stab of doubt, but he did not like it. He also received a distinct impression that his rights of proprietorship were menaced. Moreover, he was so invaded by mere curiosity that it was with difficulty he refrained from gratifying it at once. But, although he belonged to the type of Western man who would shoot the filcher of his woman without an instant’s consideration, he was the last man in the world to make a fool of himself.

Ida tried his patience but a few moments. As soon as the curtain fell she re-entered the box and presented the stranger as Lord John Mowbray, who had arrived by the evening train and sought the opera house as a relief from the hotel. She did not add that he had telephoned at once to her house and followed her as quickly as he could change his clothes.

The husband was the last to be made known to the distinguished stranger, and in spite of Mowbray’s ability to look vacuous, and Gregory’s to look like a graven image, neither could repress a spark under his lowered lids. Mowbray reared his haughty crest at once and turned away. Like many young Englishman he blushed easily, and he was by no means the first man to feel uncomfortable under the eyes of Gregory Compton. He felt the colour rising to his white forehead, and was not sorry to present his splendid back and length of limb to that searching gaze.

He sat close to Ida during the last act, and then the party went to her house to supper, there being no restaurant worthy the name in Butte. Gregory detained Ida at the door after the other had entered.

“Good night,” he said. “Luning promised to wait for me at his office. I shall talk to him until it is time to catch the train for Pony.”

“Oh, I am so sorry,” said Ida politely, and smiling charmingly. “So will the others be. And I wanted you to talk to Lord John. His brother has a ranch in Wyoming, and he has come here on some mining business. I am so glad to see him again. The men here are--well, they are all right, but quite absorbed in one thing only--whatever their profession or business happens to be. Lord John knows a little about everything. I am sure you would like him. Do ask me to take him out to the mine. He is a friend of Ora’s, too. She will ask us if you don’t.”

“Come whenever you like. If I’m not there my foreman will show you round. Good night.” And he was off. Ida, feeling that Mowbray’s arrival had been timed by Providence, went in to her guests.

XIV

“Who is this Mowbray?” Gregory asked Ora abruptly on the following evening. He was in Ora’s living-room, his long legs stretched out to the fire.

Ora, who was working on a small piece of embroidery in a frame, superlatively feminine, enveloped in a tea gown imponderable and white, looked up in surprise. They had been sitting together for an hour or more and their conversation had been wholly of his plans to entertain his party of geologists, and the attention this sensational flank attack had attracted throughout the country.

“Is Lord John here?”

“Yes. Came into the box last night. Handsome chap.”

“Mowbray is a dear. We saw a great deal of him, and he bought our tickets and helped us off generally, when we were so upset over your cable.”

“Ah! Tame cat? General utility man?”

“Hardly! He’s full of life and a charming companion.”

“Hm.”

There was another silence and then he asked abruptly: “Is he in love with Ida?”

This time Ora dropped her work and sat up rigidly; her hands turned cold. There was a peculiar alteration of pitch in Gregory’s voice that might register jealousy in a hypersensitive ear. And when his face looked most like a bronze reproduction of itself, his friends deduced that he was masking emotion.

Ora’s brain always worked swiftly. Was it possible that by subtle manipulation she could reunite this man and her friend? That he loved herself she no longer doubted, but it was equally doubtful if he would ever confess it; on the cards that if he did he never would see her again. If she left the country after adroitly re-awakening his interest in Ida and playing on his vanity and jealousy, would not reaction, the desire for consolation and companionship, carry him straight to the wife whose beauty and magnetism had once, and not so long ago, aroused all the ardours of his manhood? Ida was far more beautiful now, and quite capable of holding any man. Ora did not for a moment believe that Ida loved her husband, or never would she herself have returned to Butte; but she had divined her mortification, her wounded pride; and as a young and beautiful woman Ida needed and was entitled to the protection of her husband.

Was this her moment? Her great opportunity? Her bosom heaved, her breath came short. Almost she experienced the subtle delights of renunciation, of sacrifice, of the martyrdom of woman. It would be a great rôle to play, a great memory. And after all she had Valdobia. It was this last irresistible reflection that gave her soaring spirit a sharp tumble and she laughed aloud.

Gregory turned his head and smiled as he met the cynical amusement in her eyes. “What is it?”

“I was merely commiserating poor Mowbray. Of course he is more or less _épris_; but Ida--she hasn’t it in her to love any man.”

“That is the conclusion I arrived at long ago. But it looked as if he had followed her here, and I don’t care for that sort of talk.”

“He had planned to visit his brother in Wyoming before we met him in Genoa. Don’t worry. Ida never will let any man compromise her. She’ll parade her son of a duke for the benefit of Butte, but if he shows signs of getting out of hand she’ll pack him off.”

“Yes, Ida is too ambitious to compromise herself.”

And then another little arrow flew into Ora’s brain. Her hands trembled, but she clenched them in her lap. “Gregory,” she said steadily, “as you and Ida no longer love each other, why don’t you suggest a divorce? She could marry Mowbray and have a big position in London--his brother is almost sure not to marry--is a wreck--Ida would be quite in her element as a duchess--and you--you would be free--if you ever wanted to marry again.”

When nature has given a man a dark skin and he has permitted it to accumulate yearly coats of tan, it is difficult for him to turn white under the stress of emotion; but Gregory achieved this phenomenon as he realised abruptly what freedom might mean to him. He stood up and leaned his back against the high chimneypiece, thrusting his hands into his pockets; he had long nervous fingers which sometimes betrayed him when his face was set.

“Ida would never consent to a divorce,” he said heavily. “She’s got all sorts of old-fashioned American ideals. The West has the reputation for being lawless, and it’s got more Puritans to the square inch than are left in New England. Ida’s one of them.”

“She may have acquired more liberal ideas in Europe.”

“She told me that she didn’t care if she never saw Europe again. Last night I had quite a long talk with her before the others came in for dinner. She said she thought it the duty of Western women--particularly the women of the newer Northwest--to live in their native state and only go away occasionally in order to bring something back to it. She intimated that you put that idea into her head when you two first met.”

“Oh, yes, I believe that to be right, whatever I may do, myself.”

“What is your idea in going to Europe to live? You are just the sort of woman the West needs.” He bit out his words in the effort to be calm and casual.

“I don’t feel that I have any place here.”

Gregory started on a restless walk up and down the room.

“Look at here,” he shot out finally, “are you--I haven’t said anything about it--but--of course I’ve wanted to--are you determined to leave Mark? He’s one of the best fellows in the world. I hate to see him thrown down. You--you--I think you should reconsider.”

“I had done all my considering before I spoke to Mark. I am doing him the greatest possible kindness. He needs another sort of woman altogether to make him happy. And I? Have I not my right to happiness? Do you think I could find it with Mark?”

“No!” The word exploded. “And you--shall you marry again?”

“I don’t know.” Ora spoke in a strangled voice. New possibilities were shaking her to her foundations. For a moment the perverse imp in the purely feminine section of her brain counselled her to run away as ever from the serious mood in man, to play with great issues and then dodge them. But she brushed the prompting aside with frantic haste and summoned her courage. If this was happiness coming to her grasp she would seize it.

Gregory came swiftly back from the farther end of the room and stood before her. He had set the muscles of the lower part of his face so tightly that he could hardly open his mouth, but his narrow eyes were blazing. “If Ida would give me my freedom,” he said, “I should want to marry you. Do you understand?”

Ora stood up. Her white face was so radiant that Gregory fell back. “You love me?” he asked.

“Yes.--Oh, yes----”

“You would marry me?”

“Yes!”

Gregory stared at her, wondering if she really were suffused with white fire. Her hands fluttered toward him, and his own face was suddenly relaxed, unmasked. Ora’s lips parted and she bent forward. She knew then why men and women sacrificed the world when they found their predestined mates. Here was the one man who could give her primal joy, suffocate her intellect. And the knowledge that she was capable of such passion and of the sacrifices it might involve gave her far more satisfaction than her former brief mood of renunciation.

She made another step forward, but Gregory was at the door. “Talk to Ida!” he said harshly. “I leave it to you. Go to see her tomorrow. You can do anything with her. You must!”

And he was out of the house. He left the door open and Ora could hear his light running footsteps.

XV

On the following morning Gregory, who had spent the night in the mine and had just come up to the cabin, heard his telephone ring as he was about to take his bath and go to bed. His first impulse was to ignore the summons, but, his business instinct prevailing, he went into the office and unhooked the receiver.

“Well?” he asked, in a voice both flat and uninviting.

“It is Ida. How tired your voice sounds. I won’t keep you a minute. I have a plan to suggest. Why not let me put up those geologists? Mrs. Cameron has asked me to stay with her and will come over and help me entertain them at meals. It will not only save you a fearful hotel bill but keep them from wandering into the wrong fold.”

“Good idea!” Gregory’s voice was more animated.

“I’ll get Professor Becke to take them down into one of the big mines here, take them out myself to yours, amuse them between times with the prettiest women in town--in short stick to them closer than a brother.”

“Good! You are the right sort. I’ll meet them at the train--on the night of the second, it is--and take them right up to your house. It’s putting you to a lot----”

“Not a bit. It will be immense fun. Good-bye.”

* * * * *

On that same morning Ora went to Butte. She had telephoned to Ida, and Mowbray met her at the train with the limousine.

“Mrs. Compton had to go to some charity meeting or other,” he said, as they shook hands warmly. “I am to drive you about for an hour.”

This was better fortune than Ora, who possessed little of Ida’s patience and talent for the waiting game, had dared to anticipate.

“How jolly!” Her face lost its traces of a sleepless night as it flashed with hope and enthusiasm. “And after that dreadful train! Drive to the Gardens,” she said to the chauffeur.

She pointed out Anaconda Hill as they passed under that famous portal, and the shaft houses of other mines, suggesting that he go down with the geologists when they made the inevitable descent. “But you will find your visit to Mr. Compton’s mine more satisfactory,” she added lightly. “You will see more ore in the vein. How do you like him?”

Mowbray growled something in his thick inarticulate English voice, and Ora grasped her opportunity. She turned to him with the uncompromising directness her sinuous mind knew so well how to assume.

“Take me into your confidence,” she said peremptorily. “I can help you. At all events keep you from making any mistakes with Ida. She is what is called a difficult proposition. Are you in love with her?”

Mowbray turned a deep brick-red and frowned, but he answered intelligibly: “You know jolly well I am.”

“Then let me tell you that there is only one way you can get her. Ida is moral to the marrow of her bones. You might make her love you, for she and her husband are practically separated, but you can get her only by persuading her to divorce Mr. Compton.”

“I’ve thought of that. Of course I’d rather marry her. I’m a decent sort myself--hate skulking--and lying--she’s the last woman I’d want to compromise. But I’m so beastly poor. I’ve only twelve hundred pounds a year.”

“And she has forty thousand pounds now of her own. You need not hesitate to spend the capital, for Mr. Compton is most generous, and is sure to give her much more. He is bound to be a multimillionaire--it is only a question of a few years.”

“Does he want his own freedom?”

“I am not in his confidence. But as they no longer care for each other and have agreed to live apart--merely showing themselves together in public occasionally to avoid gossip--it is natural to suppose that he would be indifferent, at least. He cannot be more than thirty, and will be sure to want his freedom sooner or later.”

“This is splendid of you!” cried the Englishman gratefully. “She’s not happy. I know that, and now I shall know just what to do.”

“Sympathise with her. Make yourself necessary--make her feel the neglected wife, and what a devoted husband would mean. You have the game in your own hands, and I will help you.”

XVI

Ora discerned certain changes in Ida as the three reunited friends, with so many pleasant memories in common, talked gaily at luncheon. It was not only that she was a trifle thinner but there were shadows in her eyes that gave them troubled depths. The curves of her mouth also were less assured, and her strong, rather large, but beautiful hands had a restless movement. Ora, whose imagination was always ready to spring from the leash and visualise a desired conclusion, pictured Ida, if not already in love with this good-looking and delightful Englishman, as circling close; neglected and mortified, she longed for the opportunity to live her life with him; in short was champing the bit.

Ora led the conversation--no great adroitness was necessary--to the many divorces pending in Butte at the moment. Ida sniffed. Ora asserted gaily that they were merely a casual result of an era of universal progress and individualism; one of the commonplaces of modern life that hardly called for comment. “You are so up to date in everything else, my dear,” she concluded, “that I wonder you cling to such old middle-class prejudices.”

“I guess there are a few conservatives and brakes left in this country,” said Ida, drily. “I may look back with horror at the time when I chewed gum and walked out of a restaurant with a toothpick in my mouth, but Ma hammered most of my good old-fashioned prejudices into my back with the broom-handle, and I’m no more likely to forget her opinion of divorce--the poor get it sometimes as well as the rich--than the bastings I got if I played hookey from school, or sneaked out after dark alone with a beau.”

“My mother was exactly the same,” said Ora, with that charming spontaneity which so often robbed her words of the subtle insult of condescension, or the more cryptic of irony. “If I hadn’t happened to be a book-worm and had indulged in clandestine love affairs I should have been shut up on bread and water. And she had all a Southern woman’s horror of divorce. But, dear Ida! That was in the dark ages. We live in the most enlightened and individualistic era of the world’s history. I have kept my eyes and ears open ever since. Nor do I believe for a moment that we are getting any worse--we merely have achieved a more well-bred indifference toward other people’s affairs. One can hear a scandal a minute in large towns and small, if one has nothing better to do than listen; but whereas in our mothers’ time a woman was dropped if she was ‘talked about,’ today we don’t turn a hair at anything short of a quite superlative divorce court scandal--not even about girls; always provided that they continue to dress well, and keep on being charming and spending money.”

“That is about the most cynical thing I ever heard you say.”

“The truth always sounds cynical. You laugh at me for dreaming and being an idealist, but I never have shut my mind to facts as you do.”

“I don’t even blink the old facts. I don’t like them, that’s all. I don’t say, of course, that if I were married to a brute who came home drunk and beat me--but this swapping husbands like horses--well, I’m content to be a brake as long as there’s any wheel to freeze to. You know I’m not hitting at you,” she added hastily. “I’d give you the moon if you wanted it; but I put you in a class by yourself, that’s all.”

“Oh,” cried Ora, laughing. “Let us change the subject before you prove that your logic turns feminine at the crucial test. Heavens! How hideous Butte is. We drove----”

“Hideous? Butte?” demanded Ida indignantly.

“Oh, you see it through the glamour of a triumphal progress. Wait until the novelty has worn off. How do you find it?” she asked Mowbray, who had relished his excellent luncheon and admired his ally’s tactics.

“Rippin’ air. Nearly took a header out of the window this mornin’ thinkin’ I had wings. But as for looks--those mountains in the distance are not half-bad, but the foreground is--er--a little ragged--and--new--you know.” He smiled into Ida’s warning eyes. “Really, dear lady, I can understand that you were keen on gettin’ home again, because home is home, don’t you know. But beauty--tell me just where you do find it.”

Ida tossed her head. “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and mine beholds it. That is enough for me. Now, run along to the Club. I haven’t seen Ora for ages. You may come back for tea.”

She led the way up to her bedroom and they made themselves comfortable and lit their cigarettes.

“Odd as it would seem,” said Ida, “to those east and west of us who have an idea that Butte has been on one prolonged spree since she was really a camp, I have to enjoy my occasional cigarette on the sly. A few of the younger women smoke, when they have locked the doors and pulled the blinds down--and of course The Bunch does; but the majority--and those that never bat an eyelash at cocktails and champagne--think it indecent for a woman to smoke. Funny world.”

“Butte is a provincial hole. As there are no strangers present you needn’t bother to defend it. I’ve just had a brilliant idea. Why don’t you divorce Mr. Compton and marry Mowbray?”

“Aw!” Ida dropped her cigarette and burned a hole in her skirt. “Are you raving crazy?”

“I thought I was advancing a peculiarly level-headed suggestion----”

“None of it in mine!”

“But, my dear Ida, you will tire inevitably of this old camp. The glamour of all this return in a gilded chariot drawn by the cheering populace will wear off in about six months. So will your own novelty for them. It is all indescribably cheap, anyhow. If you send Mowbray away now, he will try to forget you, and forgetting is man’s peculiar accomplishment. You will have missed a great opportunity. You and Mr. Compton are manifestly indifferent to each other. Seize your chance, dear--not only for happiness, but for a splendid social position, before----”

Ora paused. Ida was glaring ahead of her with her heavy black brows pushed low over her flaming eyes. Her lips were drawn back over her sharp little teeth. Her nostrils were distended. She looked like some magnificent beast of the jungle stalking her prey.

“By God!” she whispered, her whole body heaving, “I’ll have him back. I was a fool before I left, and maybe I shouldn’t have left him at all. It’s never safe to leave a man. But when I do get him back he’ll be glad of all I’ve learned. He’s like a lunatic with a fixed idea just now--but wait.”

Ora felt cold and numb. She tried to rise, and wondered if the shock had paralysed her. She managed to articulate: “You love him then?”

But not even to Ora could Ida make any such admission; she who always had flouted both sentiment and passion! She recovered herself and tossed her head.

“Love! Who cares about love? Do you think I’m the sort of woman a man can throw down for a mine? I wouldn’t stand it even it were another woman--but ore! It makes me sick. I won’t be thrown down. And I’ll get him back!”

Ora too had recovered herself. She lit another cigarette. “I’m so glad you don’t care, dear. No man is worth agonising over, as you so often have said yourself. Forgive the doubt. I should have remembered that you were far too clever and worldly-wise for that sort of thing. That is the main reason that I am willing to marry Valdobia: I can be fond of him, like him always, be grateful for his companionship, but he can’t tear my heart out.”

“I thought you told me when you came back that you were mad about him?”

“Oh, I fancy I was strung up that day. When I am excited I always exaggerate. But do think over what I have said about Mowbray. And it would be heavenly to have you in Europe.”

“My mind’s made up. I guess I’m American to my core and marrow. Titles will never seem natural to me, and I guess we’ll both live to see them so tangled up with democracy that those that are left will look like old labels on new cans. No has-beens in mine. Oh, chuck it! What’s this I hear about little Whalen--that he’s resigned from the High and been out in the mountains prospecting since the beginning of Spring? I’ve only seen him once since I came back and then he looked like a viper that had been stepped on.”

“I met him the other day when I was out walking. He bought a claim of one of the prospectors that swarmed out there as soon as they heard of the Primo and the Perch strikes. He wore overalls and a beard. I scarcely knew him. He talked rather wildly about the hill he has located on being another Perch of the Devil.”

“I guess Gregory is responsible for that and a good many other wild dreams. I hear that a lot of young men are coming out from the East this Summer to prospect in those hills. Well, they’ll succeed or fail according to their luck mostly. Let’s go out. You’ve got two hours before your train goes--but if you’ve got a list a yard long----”

And the two sallied forth in perfect peace to shop.

XVII

Ora had more than one cause for uneasiness when she returned to her little home in the pine woods, but paramount was the fear that she should not see Gregory Compton again unless by accident. She rose early after another almost sleepless night and spent a distracted day wandering over the hills, returning at intervals to inquire if her telephone bell had rung. Once more she felt a disposition to run away, anathematising the slavery of love. Only the hope that Mowbray would wear down Ida’s resistance kept her from yielding to the impatient, imaginative, too highly organised woman’s impulse to flee when love seems hopeless and a nervous explosion imminent. She still refused to feel traitorous to Ida, but she did wonder once or twice if she ever should dare to face her as Mrs. Gregory Compton. Ida was the reverse of a fool. She might be blind now, for obvious reasons--but Ora shrugged her shoulders at the vision of Ida’s horror and wrath. What did she care for Ida or any other woman if she got her man?

She made one of her sudden dashes into the house as the telephone bell was ringing. For the moment she thought she was about to faint; then, both appalled and angry at the lawless behaviour of her nerves, she stamped her foot, shook herself, marched over to the telephone, took down the receiver, and asked in a bored voice: “Well?”

“I shall come to supper tonight if you will have me?” Gregory’s tones were those he employed when “canning” a miner.

“Delighted.” Ora’s nerves fell into place like good little soldiers. “Will you be here at seven?”

“About. I prefer to have you tell me here what she had to say.”

“Constitutionally opposed at present, but that was to be expected. Seeds always sprout if well planted and judiciously watered. Our friend from England will do his part.”

“Good. We’ll say no more about it. But I shall go to see you as usual.”

“Why not? We are not fools or children. Any new developments at the mine?”

“Shaft has reached third level. Vein seems to be about the same richness as on the second. Mann is here. Good-bye.”

As Ora, her body no longer braced and rigid, but so filled with the languor of happiness that she wanted to throw herself down on the divan and sleep, crossed the room, she became aware that someone was standing in the outer doorway. His hat was in his hand, and as she focussed her absent gaze she managed to recognise Professor Whalen. Her impulse was to turn her back and run into her bedroom; but Ora was always a great lady. She could be extremely rude to a member of her own class, but she had never permitted herself to wound the morbid sensitiveness of those to whom fortune had been less kind. So, secretly wondering if the little man really stood there, or if anything so insignificant mattered, she went forward smiling and offered him her hand.

“So good of you to come and have a cup of tea with me.” She rang a bell and ordered tea of her Chinaman. “But why did you dress up? I am accustomed to overalls and flannel shirts, and quite like the idea of living in a mining camp.”

Whalen sat on the edge of his chair and stared into the fire, twirling his hat in his hands. “I guess I’ve got to be a gentleman again,” he said with a short laugh. “There’s nothing else left for me to be.”

“Oh! I hope----”

“My find--and I paid a thousand dollars for the claim--was nothing but a gash vein. Nothing in that but low grade carbonates.”

“But are you so sure? Often veins appears to pinch out a hundred feet or more above a really rich lode.”

“I’ve poured into that hole all my savings; all I had saved from my salary during four years, and every cent of my reward in the field of letters. I even--and against my secret resolutions--consumed a legacy left me by an uncle.”

“Perhaps if you would ask Mr. Compton to look at your claim--he is a sort of ore wizard----”

“I’ll ask no favours of Gregory Compton!” Whalen burst out, violently. “Were it not for him I never would have been enticed into this foolish venture. I cannot realise it--I, who was brought up in the most conservative corner of this conservative country--I, a pedagogue, a man of letters, that I should have so far descended as to become a prospector--live in a hut, cook my own bacon, dig with a pick----” He paused choking.

“Doubtless you remembered that some of the greatest millionaires in the country began that way. Or possibly the Northwest kindled your sense of adventure--that is inherent in every real man. But why blame Mr. Compton?”

Whalen had recovered his breath. He spat out his words. “Why should a man like that have all the luck? And such colossal luck! Who is he? What is he? In what way does he compare with me--a man of no family, of no culture, of no intellect----”

“Mr. Compton has given evidence that he has one of the best brains this country has produced.” Ora spoke evenly but with a glint in her eye.

“Oh, yes, _brains_! I make a fine distinction between mere brains and intellect. He has the sort of mental composition those men always seem to have in order that they may make use of their luck and roll up millions. But intellect? Not a cell. He has never read anything. I journeyed with him from Pony to Butte not long since and endeavoured to engage him in conversation. I might as well have tried to talk to a mummy--and an ill-mannered one at that. The moment I left the subject of mines he merely looked out of the window.”

Ora laughed merrily, and poured out the tea the Chinaman had brought in. “Perhaps it is just that lack of overdevelopment that we call intellect which permits these men to concentrate upon their genius for making money.”

“But that has nothing to do with their luck in the beginning. Luck! Blind luck! Fool’s luck! And why not to me? Why to this Gregory Compton? I never believed in luck before, but since this rush, and my own personal experience----” He swallowed a mouthful of tea too hastily, scalded himself, and, while he was gasping, Ora said soothingly:

“You cannot help believing in luck if you study the early history of any mining state. There are hundreds of stories of prospectors--you have told of many yourself; the majority had little or no education, less science. Out of a hundred evenly equipped with grit, common sense, some practical knowledge of ores, perhaps two would find a rich pocket or placer. Four or five possibly made a strike that would insure them a competence if they neither gambled nor drank. The rest nothing--not after forty years of prospecting in these mountains. I fancy there is something in that old phrase about the lucky star; in astronomical parlance the position of the planets at the moment of one’s birth.”

“But why not I?” wailed the professor. “Why--why this--well, he is a friend of yours--Gregory Compton?”

“_Why not?_”

“I am infinitely his superior in every way!” cried Whalen in perfect good faith. “It is I who should have discovered those millions and taken them to Beacon Street, not this obscure young Westerner, son of an illiterate old ranchman----”

“But you didn’t,” said Ora, patiently. “Besides, the fates are not unjust. They made you a member of the New England aristocracy, and gave you intellect. Do not be unreasonable and demand the mere prospector’s luck as well.”

Whalen looked at her suspiciously, but her eyes were teasing, not satiric. He had admired her always more than any woman he had met in the West, and had come to her blindly to be consoled. Suddenly he saw an indefinable change steal over her face, although her mouth remained curled with the stereotyped smile she kept for the Whalens. It was as if something deep in her brilliant eyes came to life, and her slight bust rose under the stiff shirtwaist. Whalen’s ears were not acute and he did not hear the light footstep that preceded a peremptory knock. Ora crossed the room swiftly and opened the door. Whalen was no fool, and he had written fiction for four years. He had guessed at once that his beautiful hostess loved the man who demanded admittance, and when he heard Gregory Compton’s voice he almost whistled. But he merely arose and frowned.

“Knocked off and thought I would run in early,” Gregory was beginning, when he saw Whalen. “How are you?” he asked with more cordiality than he usually wasted upon the little man. His spirits always flew to his head when he met Ora, stolid as he might look. “How’s your mine getting on?” he added, as he selected the longest of the chairs before the fire. “Heard it had petered out.”

“It has!”

“I’ll go over and have a look at it tomorrow if you like. I fancy you’re located too close to one of the faults. The trouble with you amateur prospectors--or buyers of prospectors’ claims--is that you don’t take a geologist out with you. You lose your heads over an assay report on exceptional specimens. But I’d like to see for myself.”

“It’s no use,” said Whalen gloomily. “I have used up all my money in that----” He had learned to swear in mining camp society, but he pulled himself up hastily, “that hole.”

“If I think there is anything there I’ll grub-stake you. Nobody would buy your claim, but somebody might jump it if you let it lapse, and I want to know who my neighbours are. Have you patented it?”

“Not yet.”

“Spent five hundred dollars on it?”

“_Have_ I!”

“Well, I’ll look at it tomorrow, and if I think it’s good for anything I’ll help you out. I am going to Helena in a day or two. Come along and apply for your patent.”

“You are very kind.” Whalen felt repentant, and more grateful than he had ever condescended to feel before. “I’ll expect you tomorrow.” He inferred that he could best show his gratitude by taking himself off, and rose. “Good afternoon, Mrs. Blake. This hour has been refreshing and inspiring after my long absence from civilisation.”

“You must come soon again,” said Ora sweetly, as she marshalled him out. “The best of luck.”

She went to her bedroom for a few moments, and when she returned wore a soft tea gown made of several shades of woodland greens. She seated herself in her favourite chair, straight, with a high carved back, and took up her neglected embroidery. “Dinner will not be ready for half an hour,” she said. “How long that little man did stay. I am glad you made a friend of him, for I have always imagined that he could be venomous, and before you came in he was by way of hating you. Now tell me the surprise you have for the geologists and newspaper men on the second level.”

And for the next three hours they talked of ores.

XVIII

“Give me your hand, Gregory. I am no coward, but this is the first time I have ever been underground. My father would never permit it, nor my mother after him.”

Gregory extended his long arm behind him and Ida’s warm firm fingers clung to his hand. They had just left the skip at the second level of his mine. The geologists and the newspaper men, together with herself, Lord John, Gregory, and Mann, had entered the mine by way of the Primo shaft, inspected the insignificant vein of copper which had merely been blocked out, awaiting the possible erection of a concentrating plant--for it was not worth the expense of freight to Anaconda--thence down the ladder from the hole blasted by Apex, and into the drift where the magnificent vein of Perch of the Devil also merely had been blocked out; but for a more subtle reason. The case in Gregory’s favour was so flagrant that the great men had laughed, although gracefully submitting to interviews on the spot and expressing themselves with as few technicalities as possible. That the Primo copper upon which Apex had also sunk was a mere attenuated fork of the great vein which indisputably had faulted from the original vein in Gregory Compton’s property the reporters could see for themselves. Under the Apex law Gregory was within his lateral rights in sinking under the adjoining claim and thence under the Primo mine; and as far beyond as the vein persisted.

Against a man less determined and resourceful than Gregory Compton a wealthy corporation could obtain any verdict it demanded; but to persist in a suit for Apex rights after this public exposition would make any trust the laughing-stock of a continent. Even to persist in the claim that he was mining under an agricultural patent, and therefore outside his rights, would be mere petty persecution; and inevitably both suits would steal noiselessly to limbo. Amalgamated knew when it was beaten and would take its medicine with a grimace and watch for its next opportunity.

Ida, although she disliked the sensation of being underground, the chill of the tunnels and the drip of candle-grease on her smart linen skirt, had been deeply impressed by the scene in the excavation on the Perch vein: the men with their keen upturned faces, their peering eyes so close to the moving candles, the little yellow flames travelling along the beautiful yellow metal, the eager nervous hands of the newspaper men, the intense blackness beyond the radius of the candles. But her eyes returned constantly to her husband’s face. His eyes gleamed with copper fires. His profile against the dark background of the cavern looked as if carved in the rock by some prehistoric race.

The blood scorched her face and her heart leapt with pride as she heard these distinguished men defer to him, express their admiration without reserve. A year ago he had been as little known as when she married him. Today his extraordinary abilities were recognised by the entire country, and tomorrow he would be one of its colossi.

She was the only woman that had gone down. Mrs. Cameron and Mrs. Collier had preferred to remain comfortably with Ora in the bungalow, or to help her spread the tables under the pines, where luncheon was to be served. Therefore was she privileged to keep close to the host, and when they descended into the blackness of the second level she embraced further her feminine prerogatives. Mann had gone down first, the guests had followed, and Gregory, after a vain protest, had taken her down in the skip when it returned for himself.

The rest of the party had pushed forward, for they had been promised a surprise. Ida would have lingered, but Gregory pulled her on. He wanted to hear the comments. The racket of the drills had stopped. Ida saw the last of the guests disappear up a short ladder.

“Am I to go up into a stope?” she asked.

“If you want to see what we’ve come for.” He ran up the ladder, and she followed, insinuated herself into the hole and stood upright in the large excavation on the vein.

“Is it gold?” she gasped.

“No, but it’s a streak--a shoot--of chalcopyrite ten feet wide and of the highest value. And it may go down eight or nine hundred feet before it loses its richness and degenerates into a lower grade of ore. But there may be millions of tons of that. This is one of the few great shoots of chalcopyrite known.”

“Gregory!” said Ida ecstatically, “do you remember I always had such faith in you that I urged you so often to prospect on the ranch that you got quite cross?”

“Yes, I remember.”

“Never say I doubted you. I may be enchanted at all this success and recognition of your abilities, but I have never had the least sensation of surprise.”

Gregory smiled down into the eager beautiful face so close to his shoulder. She had manipulated him down the ladder into the tunnel and for the moment they were alone. “I hope you are half as proud of me as I am of you,” he said gallantly, although he was a trifle uneasy; not because she looked as if she might kiss him there in the semi-dark, but because he felt an impulse to kiss her. For the moment he regretted the wild romance upon which he was embarked, the torments of its present, the tragic possibilities of its future. Ida now would make an ideal wife, demanding far less of his jealously guarded inner self, to say nothing of his time, than Ora, who had that most terrible of all gifts, a passionate soul. But this disloyalty was brief, and he frowned and disengaged his hand, although he was far from suspecting that Ida had yielded to the temptation to pay him deliberate court.

“I shall be able to give you a string of pearls before long,” he said lightly, “or a million or two to play with. I want to hear what these men have to say. Suppose you go back with Lord John, and tell them that we are coming up soon for lunch. Ring the bell in the station twice for the skip and three times for hoist.”

Ida shrank back against the wall as if she had been struck, but when Lord John, who had made several futile attempts to separate her from her husband, came eagerly forward, she left Gregory to the chorus of enthusiasm and congratulation, and obeyed his directions.

XIX

Ida was in such high spirits during the luncheon that she managed to be brilliant and amusing within the limits of her expurgated vocabulary. Only Ora, who knew her so well, saw the sombre fire in the depths of her eyes, the sudden twist of her mouth at the corners, noted that her cheeks were crimson instead of their usual delicate coral, the occasional clenching of her hands. But she had little time to speculate upon the cause, for the large party were her guests, and, like any other Rocky Mountain hostess in the liquid month of June, she feared the sudden drenching of her tables.

But the day remained fine, and the geologists, who ever since their arrival in Butte had evinced a remarkable indifference to geology as a topic for conversation, were as lively as the newspaper men, and deeply appreciative of the good looks and animated conversation of the four women who ate almost nothing in their efforts at mental subdivision. Ora had invited also her engineer and Professor Whalen, placing the latter as far from Ida as possible; but she saw that he was covertly watching the woman he must hate. Ida had thrown him a careless nod when they met by the tables in the grove; and he had returned it with a bow of surpassing dignity.

Gregory, now that the men of science and of the press had served his purpose, was eager to be rid of them, and excused himself when the luncheon was half over, on the plea that he was his own manager and needed at the mine. He disappeared into the Primo shaft house, as he often took that short cut to his own shaft, and Mowbray, who had been silent, for Gregory affected his buoyant spirits unaccountably, moved his chair up beside Ida and endeavoured to divert her mind from the general to the specific. But she snubbed him and he relapsed into gloom. On the train, however, when she saw that Whalen, who was on his way to Helena to apply for his patent, was watching her, she flirted pointedly with the handsome Englishman.

The guests were to leave Butte on the seven o’clock train, which, fortunately for the strain that all were beginning to feel, was only half an hour late. When it had pulled out and Ida had waved her last farewell, she walked in silence to her car, and intimated with a curt nod that Mowbray might take the seat beside her. “But tell Ben where you want to go,” she said, “for I can’t ask you to dine with me tonight.”

Mowbray told the chauffeur to drop him at the Club and then asked his lady, whose animation had dropped to zero, if anything had happened to annoy her, or if she were merely worn out.

“Don’t ask me any questions,” said Ida sharply. “I’m sorry to seem inhospitable but I’ve got something to think out. You can go to the dance at the Country Club.”

“I shall more likely go to my rooms and write letters. Don’t worry about me. Shall we have a ride tomorrow morning?”

“I don’t know.”

Mowbray was always philosophical about women, having been brought up with many sisters. “You are tired out,” he said without too much sympathy. “Just call me up if you feel like doing anything in the morning.”

“All right. Good night.”

She left him at the Silver Bow Club. Her own house was only a few blocks distant. She told the maid who admitted her that she wanted no dinner and should go to bed at once and without assistance. When she reached the seclusion of her bedroom she locked the door, flung her hat on the floor and stamped on it, broke several valuable objects, and then paced up and down, gritting her teeth to keep from screaming.

There was but one person on earth that she hated more than she hated Gregory Compton and that was herself. She had meant to play a waiting game of many interviews, in which her fine calculation had mapped out the insidious approach, the adroit pushing aside of barrier after barrier, until Gregory returned almost inadvertently to his allegiance. She had no desire for romantic scenes; they would have embarrassed herself, and with her instinctive knowledge of man, she knew that Gregory would shrink back from any situation that might involve explanations. Nor did she wish to let a man so absorbed as Gregory feel that he was loved too much, lest he chafe at the thought of feminine exactions, and his mind continue to dwell upon the delights of freedom. He might be capable of moments when the woman alone existed, but there would be long intervals when he would hate a woman’s clinging arms if they made him ten minutes late for his work, particularly if he was headed for his beloved mine. Ida, shrewd, self-controlled, watchful, knew herself, now that her powers were developed, to be the natural mate for such a man. He would drive a temperamental woman mad.

And she had seemed to make a steady progress. The geologists had remained for three days in Butte before visiting Perch of the Devil. On the second evening they had been entertained by the professors of the School of Mines, but on the other two evenings she had given them elaborate dinners, and Gregory had attended each. She had seen that he was increasingly proud of her, and grateful. Upon both occasions they not only had had a little talk apart but he had drifted back to her more than once.

And today she had spoiled everything! In the darkness of that mine she had weakened and made open love to him. She had practically offered herself--she ground her teeth as she thought of her clinging fingers, her appealing eyes, her cheek almost brushing his--and he had rejected her--with consideration, but finality!

If he had knocked her down she would have cherished hope. But in this hour she had none. His indifference was colossal. The busiest men in America had their women; she no longer could comfort herself with the delusion that the mine was a controlling and exclusive passion; she merely had ceased completely to attract him--and she remembered how thorough he was; she no more could relight those old fires than she could blow life into the dead ashes of Big Butte. He would turn to another woman one of these days; it was not within human possibility that he would go through life without love; but not to her! not to her! She would do to entertain his friends, to flaunt his wealth and advertise his success; in time no doubt he would treat her as a confidential friend; but sexually she was an old story. It was apparent that the mere thought bored him; it was only when Gregory was bored that he was really polite.

If she could but have accepted this, resigned all hope, instead of subjecting herself to humiliation; she, who had never failed to send the blood to a man’s head with a glance! She didn’t want to hate him. She didn’t want to hate herself. Why could she not have been content to accept the inevitable with philosophy and grace?

The answer that, owing to some mysterious law of her being, she loved him, made her want to smash everything else in the room; but she would have some difficulty concealing the present wreckage from her servants, so she bit her handkerchief to shreds instead.

When the furies had tired her body she fell into a chair and although her brain was still hot with the blood sent there by excitement and lack of food, she admitted frankly that the peculiar nature of her agitation was due to wounded pride and intense mortification; had she arrived at a point where she no longer could hope, but without self-betrayal, she might have wept bitter tears, but there still would have been a secret sweetness in loving him. Now, she growled out her hatred. She longed to do something to hurt him. If she only were another sort of woman! She would go to Mowbray’s rooms, go to Helena with him for a week. And simultaneously she yearned to be consoled, not only in her heart but in her wounded pride.

Should she ask her husband for a divorce; revenge herself by becoming an English duchess? Ora, in the moment or two they had found together at the station, had told her that Mowbray’s older brother was at Davos, unmistakably dying of tuberculosis, and that his engagement, insisted upon by his father, had been broken. Valdobia had given her this news in his last letter, adding the hope that his friend would bring Ida back with him that they might all be together once more.

Was this the solution of her problem? A marriage that would demonstrate to Gregory Compton that her moment of seeming weakness was mere coquetry; a marriage that would raise her an immeasurable social distance above him; a permanent dissociation from everything that could remind her of him and this terrible obsession that had disorganised her being, reduced her to the grovelling level of the women whose dependence on the favour of man she had always despised?

When she reflected that her revenge would fall flat, Gregory’s not being the order of mind to appreciate the social pre-eminence of a titled race, she ground her teeth, again. There was nothing left but to consider herself. Should she choose the part that not only would exalt her station and fill her life with the multifarious interests of a British peeress, but banish this man in time from her memory; or stay on and alternate torments with moments of indescribable sweetness when he smiled upon her? And might she not yet manipulate him into her net if she continued to play the waiting game? Or would she go wholly to pieces the first time they were alone together?

Her pride strangled at this possibility and brought her to her feet. The blood was still boiling in her head, she knew what nerves were for the first time in her life. She made up her mind to go out and walk. In this part of the town she was not likely to meet anyone.

She found another hat, put on a warm coat, and let herself out of the house. It was ten o’clock. All the West Side, no doubt, was at the Country Club.

For a time she walked rapidly and aimlessly, trying to focus her mind on other things. But when a woman is in love and the path is stony, she is obsessed much as people are that suffer from shock and reiterate ceaselessly the circumstances of its cause. Her brain seethed with hate, longed for revenge. Nothing would have gratified her more than to take the secret revenge of infidelity. Many a woman has taken a lover for the satisfaction of laughing to herself at her husband’s dishonour; to dishonour being the most satisfactory of all vengeance, whether open or concealed.

She realised abruptly that her thoughts had led her unconsciously to the door of John Mowbray’s lodgings. The flat had been lent him by a banker to whom he had brought a letter from his brother, and who had gone East immediately after his arrival; the banker’s wife lived in Southern California. It occupied the second story of a house in West Broadway and had its own entrance on a side street. Mowbray had given a tea there a day or two before, and Ida had presided.

She did not delude herself for a moment that she could take her full revenge upon the unconscious Gregory, but at least she could do something quite shocking, something that would infuriate a husband. Ida was not afraid of any man, least of all one that wished to make a duchess of her, but it would be an additional satisfaction to torment him, and an adventure with a spice of danger in it no doubt would restore her equilibrium. If Mowbray made violent love to her she felt, by some obscure process of feminine logic, that she would forgive Gregory Compton.

She glanced hastily up and down the street, then more sharply, wondering if she had dreamed that once or twice she had looked over her shoulder with the sense of being followed. It was a bright moonlight night. No one was in sight. She rang the bell of Mowbray’s flat. The door was opened from above. At the head of the stairs stood the Jap who served as housekeeper and valet.

She hesitated a moment, taken aback. She had forgotten the servant. Then she closed the door behind her. “Is Lord John in?” she asked negligently.

The Jap spread out his hands deprecatingly. “His lordship not at home,” he announced.

Ida hesitated another moment, then ascended the stair and entered the living-room. “Turn on the lights,” she said, “I shall wait for him.”

The Jap obeyed orders, bowed, and withdrew. For a moment Ida was tempted to telephone to the Silver Bow Club, but Mowbray was sure to return soon to write his letters, and she liked the idea of giving him a surprise. She lit a cigarette, selected a novel from the bookcase, and sank into the most comfortable of the chairs. The room was warm; both body and brain were very weary. The cool night air had driven the blood from her head. She yawned, dropped the book, fell sound asleep.

She awoke as the clock was striking half-past one. She was still alone. For a moment she stared about her, bewildered, then rose and laughed aloud.

“This is about the flattest----” She went swiftly out into the hall and awoke the slumbering Jap. “You little yellow devil,” she cried, “why didn’t you tell me that his lordship had gone to the party at the Country Club?”

Once more the Jap was deprecating. “Madam did not ask.”

Ida produced a gold piece. “Well, you are not to tell him that I came, nor anyone else. If you do I’ll wring your neck.”

The Jap’s eyes, fixed upon the gold, glistened. “Why should I tell?” he asked philosophically; and having pocketed the coin ran downstairs and bowed the lady out.

When Ida was about to turn the corner she whirled about, this time with a definite sensation of being followed. But the street was empty save for a man slouching down the hill with an unsteady gait, his head nodding toward his chest. It was a familiar sight in any mining town; nevertheless she quickened her steps, and in a moment was safe within her own house.

XX

On the morning following the departure of the geologists Gregory took the bit between his teeth and went in to Butte to see his wife. In his first moment of shock and confusion it had seemed to him best that Ora, whose subtlety he recognised, was the one to manipulate Ida’s still too formalistic mind toward the divorce court; but he was unaccustomed to relegate any part of his affairs to others, least of all to a woman. Nor did he think it necessary to inform Ora of his sudden decision. He might work almost double shift to keep her out of his thoughts and diminish temptation, and he might marry her and continue to love her passionately; but she would obtain little ascendency over him. He knew what he wanted; he had trained his will until at times it appeared formidable even to himself, and he was as nearly the complete male that regards woman, however wonderful, as the supplementary female as still survives.

He had few illusions about himself, and it had crossed his mind more than once, since the hope of divorce had dazzled both of them, that for a year or two or least there must be a certain amount of friction between a nature like his and a complex, super-civilised, overgrown feminine ego like Ora Blake. While he had sat with his legs stretched out to the fire and his eyes half closed, his body weary, but mentally alert, he had received certain definite impressions of an independent almost anarchical mind, contemptuous of the world and its midges save as they might be of use to herself; of a mind too well-bred ever to be managing and exacting in any vulgar sense, but inexorable in its desires and as unscrupulous in their pursuit as her father had been; of a superlative refinement coupled with a power of intense and reckless passion found only in women possessing that quality of imagination that exalts and idealises the common mortal attributes. Moreover, it was a mind that, the first joy of submission and surrender diminished, would think for itself.

Until that night when both had dropped the mask for a moment he had never thought of her as a complicated ego, merely as one from whom he felt temporarily separated after a union of centuries; and it had been the reluctant admission that he knew her very little, save as a gracious woman and his own companion, that had enabled him to school himself to spend long hours with her alone as before. He had tumbled blindly into matrimony once, and no matter how much he might love this woman, to whom he had seemed from the first to be united by a secret and ancient bond, he was determined none the less to marry the second time with his eyes wide open.

But although his glimpses of Ora’s winding depths gave him moments of uneasiness he always fell back upon the complacent reflection that he was a man, a man, moreover, with a cast-iron will, and that the woman did not live who would not have to adapt herself to him did he take her to wife.

Until the day before the party at the mines he had been content to drift, but a certain moment down in his own mine had given a new and abrupt turn to both thoughts and purpose. Ida might have spared herself her agonies of shame: she had not betrayed her love, but she had given him a distinct impression that she was employing her redoubtable feminine weapons to reduce him to his old allegiance. He had remembered for a poignant moment that he once had loved this woman to distraction, and during that moment he saw her again as the most beautiful and distracting of her sex. His brief surrender had filled him with fury. He had no intention of despising himself. From boyhood up he had had nothing but contempt for the man that did not know his own mind. If it had not been for this serene confidence in himself, he, who was constitutionally wary in spite of the secret and wistful springs of romance in his nature and the apparent suddenness of his bold plunges, never would have married Ida Hook, nor any woman, until he had sounded her thoroughly. But he had behaved like any hot-headed and conceited young fool, and, much as he now admired Ida, it both infuriated him and appalled him to feel even for a moment toward her as he had in his raw inexperienced youth.

He therefore made up his mind to go to her like a rational being and ask her to give him his freedom. They had made a mistake. They were reasonable members of an advanced civilisation, where mistakes were recognised and rectified whenever possible. He did not doubt for a moment that reason and logic must appeal as forcibly to a woman as to himself.

The door of his wife’s house was opened after the usual delay, and the maid told him that Mrs. Compton was upstairs in the billiard room “or somewheres.” He took the stairs three steps at a time lest his courage evaporate; but drew a long breath of relief when he entered the large square hall and saw nothing of Ida. He would have rung for the maid, but reflected that no doubt he had already provided enough gossip for the republic below stairs without admitting that he did not know his way round his wife’s house. He was about to knock on each door in turn when he noticed that one in a corner at the end of the hall was open and that it led into a narrow passageway. Beyond there was light, possibly in one of those boudoirs of which he had heard. Mrs. Murphy would have been sure to have a boudoir, and no doubt Ida, little disposed as she was to indolence, spent some part of her mornings in it.

He adventured down the passageway that terminated in a large room full of sunlight. He saw his wife standing in the middle of this room looking about her with a curious expression of wistfulness. The little hall was carpeted, but she heard him almost as soon as he saw her; she would have known those light swift footsteps in a marching army. He was inside the room before she could reach the doorway and close it behind her and astonished to see a deep blush suffuse her face. His quick darting glance took in his surroundings as he shook hands with her. The room was a nursery.

“I had two beds put in here and have just seen that they were taken out,” stammered Ida.

Her embarrassment was communicable, but he said gruffly as he walked to the window, “Didn’t know the Murphys had children.”

“Oh, yes, they had two little ones. Seven in all. I think it odd they should have left the toys here even if they are rich enough to buy toys every day. There is something sacred about a child’s toys.”

Ida was merely talking against time, but she hardly could have said anything better calculated to arrest his attention.

He turned and looked at her in astonishment.

“Do you mean to intimate--that you wish you had children? You?”

Ida’s brain as well as her body was very weary, but it sprang to action at once. “Oh, yes,” she said intensely. “Oh, yes! And I might have had two! They would be wonderful in this house.”

“But----” He cast about desperately. “With two children you could not have gone to Europe.”

“That wouldn’t have mattered.”

“But--don’t you realise that it is this last year of unusual advantages that has developed you so--so--remarkably? You hated children----”

“And do you suppose it was Europe that made me want children?”

“Oh, of course, nothing is as simple as that. You were taken out of yourself, out of your narrow self-sufficient little life; all your fine latent powers were developed----”

“But not altogether by Europe! Still, I don’t deny that it woke me up, gave me not one new point of view but many, developed me, if you like that better. Would you like lunch earlier? You get up at such unearthly hours----”

“I’m not hungry. I want to talk to you. That is what I came for. Won’t you sit down--no, not here! Let us go where there are comfortable chairs. I--I am tired.”

“Very well. Let us go down to the library.” As she walked before him he noted that her superb body, which usually looked as if set with fine steel springs, was heavy and listless.

The masculine looking room below restored his balance.

“You don’t look as well as usual,” he remarked, as he threw himself into the deepest of the chairs. “Yesterday was a hard day, and you had had those men on your hands for----”

“I am tired,” said Ida briefly, “but it doesn’t matter. What do you want to talk to me about?”

He did not answer for a few moments, then he stood up and thrust his hands into his pockets and scowled at the carpet. Involuntarily Ida also rose to her feet and braced herself, crossing her arms over her breast.

“It is impossible for this to go on,” said Gregory rapidly. “It is unnatural. People don’t submit to broken lives in these days. I think you had better get a divorce and be happy. Mowbray seems to be a fine fellow. Of course no one doubts that he has followed you here. He could make you happy, and as soon as I am able--in a year or two--I shall give you a million; in time more.”

“Oh! Oh!”

“You surely cannot want to live for ever like--like--this!”

“I have no desire to marry again. Have you?” She shot the question at him, every nerve on edge with suspicion.

But the last thing in his mind was to betray Ora, and he answered promptly. “No. But I am absorbed in my mine, and my life will be more crowded every year with accumulating interests. You are a woman. You are young--and--and--you wish for children.”

Ida believed that after her revelation of yesterday he had come to let her down gently. She determined to throw her all on one heavy stake. If she lost, at least she would have had the satisfaction of telling him that she loved him; she had already sacrificed her pride, and there was a reckless sweetness in the thought of revealing herself absolutely to this man. When a woman loves a man not quite hopelessly she experiences almost as much satisfaction in listening to her own confession as to his.

She drew herself up, her arms still across her breast, and Gregory thought he had never seen a woman look so dignified and so noble.

“Listen, Gregory,” she said, with no tremor in her voice but deepening sadness in her eyes, “I regret that I have no children because they would be yours. I am willing to live and die alone because I have lost your love. I know how I lost it, but, as I look back over my crudity and ignorance, I do not see how I could have kept it. You were immeasurably above and beyond me. Nature, or some mental inheritance, gave you sensitiveness, refinement, distinction, to say nothing of brains. I had to achieve all that I am now. I was a raw conceited fool like thousands of American girls of any class, who think they are just a little too good for this world. I had ceased to love you in my inordinate love of myself, and the natural consequence was, that as I made no attempt to improve myself, I lost you as soon as my halo of novelty had disappeared. I took for granted, however, that I was returning from Europe to the old conditions. When I discovered that you had no such intention I was piqued, astonished, angry. But when I thought it all out I understood. You were within your rights, and you have behaved with decency and self-respect. I have nothing but unmitigated contempt for two people that continue to live together as a mere matter of habit and convenience. They are the real immoralists of the world, and the girls that ‘go wrong’ know it and laugh at the reformers. Of course I never had ceased to love you down deep, but it took just the course of conduct you pursued to make me known to myself. I realise that it is hopeless--too late. I never intended to betray myself, but I did so in an unguarded moment yesterday. Otherwise I never should have told you all this. I have realised since then that I have lost you irrevocably, but at least if I cannot be your wife I will be no man’s, and I shall continue to bear your name--and see you sometimes.”

Gregory, feeling as if he were being flayed, had dropped upon the edge of a chair and buried his face in his hands. When she finished he said hoarsely: “I never dreamed--I never imagined--I thought you incapable of real feeling----”

“I think I was then. And since--Well, you are only a man, after all, and I made you think what I chose until yesterday--Do you mean----” she added sharply, “that you did not guess--did not _know_ yesterday?”

“It never occurred to me. I thought you merely were flirting a little----”

“Hi!” cried Ida. Then she got back into her rôle. “It doesn’t matter,” she said with sad triumph. “I am glad I have told you. As for the future? You have convinced Butte that we are the best of friends. Stay away if you wish unless I give an entertainment where your absence would cause too much comment. You don’t want to marry again, but you may feel yourself as free as air. And one day--when you are worn out, tired of the everlasting struggle in which you moneymakers work harder than the day labourer, with his eight-hour laws and freedom from the terrific responsibilities of money; when you begin to break and want a home, I will make one for you. There is the doorbell. Lord John is coming for lunch. I shall give him his dismissal--once for all.”

Gregory stood up and took her hand. He had a vague masculine sense of unfairness somewhere but he could not begin to define it, and he was as deeply impressed as discouraged. “You are a grand woman, Ida,” he said. “This is not an hour that any man forgets. I wish that you might be happy.”

“Nature never intended that people on this planet should be happy--only in spots, anyhow. And don’t worry about me. You have put me in the way of getting a great deal out of this old game we call life, and I am grateful to you. Good-bye.”

They shook hands and Gregory went out into the hall as the maid was admitting Lord John. This time the men made no pretence at politeness. They merely glared and passed.

XXI

The Primo vein had been recovered some time since and Ora had traversed the fault drift twice and watched the drilling from the station; not only to assert her rights as mistress of the mine but to experience the sensations she had anticipated. She soon discovered that when a woman is in love, and the issue doubtful, other interests fail to provide sensations. But she went down into the mine every day and roamed through the older workings. She was tormented and restless, but by no means without hope; and this being the case she sometimes wondered why she continued to write to Valdobia as if nothing had occurred to interfere with their tacit engagement. It was her duty to tell him the truth, at once, but she switched off all other currents every Saturday morning and wrote her Roman long gay tantalising letters; being gifted as a scribe, like so many women, she made them notable with amusing and enlightening incidents of mining-camp life.

She had not seen Gregory since Monday evening. He had gone suddenly to Butte on the morning following the visit of the geologists, and had telephoned her that he should take the afternoon train to the Capital and no doubt be detained for several days. She had expected that he would telephone or telegraph from Helena; that he would write was too much to expect; she had never seen his handwriting. But he had not recognised her existence.

Four days after his departure she went down into her mine and walked as far as the ragged opening blasted by the Apex men, thinking of Ida. How much longer would it be before Mowbray overcame her prejudices, and her own independent and proud spirit revolted under her husband’s complete indifference? Few women were given such an opportunity for revenge both subtle and open as Mowbray was offering to Ida Compton.

It was at this point in her reflections that Ora heard a light footfall coming down the fault drift of Perch of the Devil. Without an instant’s hesitation she descended the short ladder that had been placed between the two drifts for the benefit of the geologists, and relit her candle. She met Gregory in the little station. He also held a candle, but he was so startled at the apparition that he dropped it. She thrust the point of her candlestick into a wooden post.

“I was going over to see you,” he said unsteadily as he picked up his candle, relighted it, and mechanically followed her example. He turned abruptly and walked half way up the drift and back, while she stood still, shivering with anxiety. Something had put his determined serenity out of joint. A crisis impended. She felt her unsteadiness and sat down suddenly on the edge of an ore car, fancying this dimly lighted room and the black passage leading to it looked as a death-house cell must look on the eve of execution.

Finally she stammered: “What is it? Please tell me?”

He leaned against the wall in front of her. “I am afraid it’s all up,” he said lifelessly. “I went in on Tuesday to ask Ida to obtain a divorce. She refused to listen. She has no wish to remarry and will have none of divorce. Nothing could have been more definite than our interview.”

“But--but surely in time--if we have patience----”

“There is no hope. Mowbray entered as I left. She intended to dismiss him at once.”

Ora, without reasoning, of which she was incapable at the moment, felt that he had been convinced by more than argument and mere words. She flung her arms over her lap and dropping her head upon them burst into a wild transport of tears and sobs; she was so unused to all expression of emotion that she neither knew nor cared how to control it, and the tears swept out the floodgates that had held her passion in check.

She looked up suddenly and saw Gregory standing over her with twitching face and clenched hands; and exulting in the complete abandonment of all the controls that civilisation has bred, she sprang to her feet, flung herself into his arms and her own arms about his neck. She had her immediate reward, for he nearly crushed her, and he kissed her until they both were breathless and reeling.

This was the passion she had read and dreamed of; for once the realities were commensurate; instinct warned her to postpone argument and prolong the moment to its utmost. There was room in her brain for the doubt if such a moment ever could come again, so little of love-making is wholly unpremeditated. So she clung to him and kissed him, and in that dim cavern his dark face, so reminiscent of those great prehistoric races that interested him, looked as he felt, primeval man that had found his mate.

But, whatever his ancient inheritance, he was the immediate product of a highly practical civilisation. His keen calculating brain sent a lightning flash across his passion. He lifted her off her feet and sat her down on the ore car. Then he took a candlestick in either hand.

“Come to the other station,” he said peremptorily, and led the way to a less dangerous seclusion.

He was half way up the fault drift before Ora, subdued but rebellious, stooped mechanically and found the veil that she wore in place of a hat when in the mines. She followed him slowly. She felt rather than reasoned that she had missed her opportunity and wished angrily that she had had lovers and knew better how to manage men. By the time she reached the shaft station the confusion in her mind had lifted somewhat and she had arrived at the conclusion that she could not overcome him in the same way again, but must use her brains. She sat down on the box and smoothed her hair with apparent unconcern.

Gregory had disposed of the two candlesticks and said, his voice still unsteady: “There isn’t much to say, but I want to have my last interview with you in my mine. I cannot get away from here for two or three days. Will you leave at once?”

“Will you listen to me? I have my right to be heard?”

“What is there to say?”

She clasped her hands in her lap and looked up at him. Gregory sighed and set his teeth. She looked surpassingly lovely and rather helpless--women, at their best, always seemed to him pathetic.

“Gregory,” she said, “you don’t doubt that I love you?”

“No. But what is the use? Do you suppose I am going to make you my mistress--all Montana would know it in less than no time. I’m no saint, but it wouldn’t work--not for us!”

“But you want me?”

“Oh!” He turned away, then swung round upon her. She had stood up. Her head was bent forward. “You should help me out!” he cried angrily. “Can’t you see--it’s you I’m thinking of. Do you suppose I want all the sporting women in Butte making horrible jokes about you--all your friends cutting you? What’s a man good for if he doesn’t protect a woman?”

“Love affairs have lasted for years without being found out.”

“Precious seldom. And we are not buried in a big city. I must live out here and you would either have to live out here too, or I should be sneaking into your house in Butte. A business-like intrigue! Remember I lived somewhat before I married. Sentiment and romance soon evaporate----”

“Oh, yes, that is always what I have thought when I have read the American novelists’ attempts to portray what they call a ‘guilty love’. The only word that expresses it delicately is _liaison_, and the setting should be foreign as well. There is no background here. We are still under the drab shadow of Puritanism. I have heard it estimated that twenty-five thousand American women go abroad every year to indulge in a fleeting _liaison_ that gives them courage to endure the desperately material and commonplace life of this country for another year. You don’t understand that because you never have been in Europe. But Egypt--Italy--in Southern Europe anywhere--with its unbridled beauties of nature and its far more poetic beauties that centuries of art have given it--and a thousand years of love behind us--Oh, cannot you imagine how wonderful love would be? Do you think _I_ should ever want to come back?”

Gregory was staring at her. “Do you mean,” he stammered, “that you would sacrifice your reputation openly--your future--do you care enough for that?”

“I mean I love you so exclusively that I wish I had a thousand times more to sacrifice.”

“But--but--there are always Americans travelling--and you know many Europeans----”

“They are always easy to avoid. There are villas with walls, and pink flowers on top of the walls. And we could travel and see the wonders of art when the tourist season was over. Nor would I monopolise you. You could have the society of men of brains and achievement everywhere.”

He continued to stare at her radiant wistful face. He had known that she loved him, but it had never occurred to him that she would be willing to give up the world for his sake. She was a proud woman, an aristocrat, she had an exceptional position everywhere; the great world when they parted stood ready to offer its consolations.

She had unrolled a heavenly vision! His mind had revolted from debasing her to the status of what is euphemistically known in the West as “sporting women”; he also remembered the immediate disillusionments of his younger manhood and wondered if the hideousness of Butte had been responsible. The Mediterranean with its ancient civilisations flourishing and forgotten before the historic period, Egypt, full-grown offspring of a still more ancient but vanished civilisation--both called to that archæological instinct so closely allied to the geological, made him fancy he heard faint ancestral voices. Ora’s eyes were holding his, and her gaze was as powerful as his own. For the moment he no longer was a son of the newest section of the newest world. The turquoise waters of the Mediterranean spread before him, but he saw it alive with galleys----

He jerked his eyes away, folded his arms and stared downward. He must think rationally, not with vapours in his brain. It might be that he would be more than fool to sacrifice to any consideration the one chance for happiness in perfect union that life would offer him.

Suddenly he became aware that he was staring at the rocky floor of his mine, of its first level; the flickering candle flames revealed bits of bright yellow metal. And below was the second level with its superb shoot of copper ore ten feet wide. And below, on the third level, still was the vein far more beautiful than virgin gold. And down--down--in those vast unlocked caverns--what mysteries--what wonder-ores might not the earth harbour for him alone to find and name----

“What are you thinking of?” cried Ora sharply. Then she threw out her arms wildly. “I know! I know! It is those accursed ores! Oh, God! What have I in me, I, a mere woman, to compensate for the loss of a mine? I was a fool--Of course! Of course!”

But Gregory, although his blood had frozen in his veins at the horrid vision of a permanent divorce from his mine, would make no such admission.

“Ora,” he said quietly, “it would be very wonderful--for about three months. You would despise me if I were content to dawdle away my life in an olive grove, or throw away my best years and these great energies nature has given me, doing nothing in that old civilisation in which I could find no place. And in time you would resent the weakness that had stranded you with no recourse in life but myself. That sort of thing has never been a success and never will be, because nature did not make man to live on love alone, and it is much the same with the intellectual woman. It wouldn’t work. Not with us. I have known from the beginning that it must be marriage or nothing. And Ida would not divorce me if I ran away with you. She would be entitled to her revenge and she would take it.” He leaned forward and signalled the station call. “Please take the skip when it comes. I am going below.” And he ran down the ladder.

XXII

Ora got into the skip and was whisked to the surface.

She drew the veil over her head and face, wishing dimly that she had gone home through the mines; but a moment later the veil fell to her shoulders unnoticed. As she crossed the Apex claim she was vaguely aware that someone, almost in her path, lifted his hat. She bowed automatically, feeling like those poor wound-up royalties who must smile graciously upon their loyal people even though a cancer devour the body or the brain reel with sorrow.

Whalen, abnormal in vanity and conceit though he was, took no offence; not only was this in his estimation the one great lady of the Western annex, but he was startled by the expression in her fixed eyes of anguish, terror, and surprise. He had seen Gregory Compton go down into his mine not a half an hour ago, and it was easy for his fictionised if unimaginative mind to conjure up a hazy picture of the scene underground. He turned very red, partly from gratification at being so close to human passion and pain, but more from the knowledge that he shortly could offer all the elements for another and a still more dramatic crisis. At the same time he could do the one woman he admired in this wilderness a good turn and heal his cankerous ache for vengeance.

Ora went on to her little house and sank into a chair before the burnt-out logs. Her body felt as if it were a vessel into which had been poured all the waters of woman’s bitterness and despair. Nevertheless, her predominant sensation was astonishment. For a year she had lived in a fool’s paradise, indissolubly mated with Gregory Compton. It was only in the moment when the idea of his own divorce flashed into her mind that she realised she had meant to have him for ever, that her imagination had been a mere playground on which she had romped, and abruptly abandoned when she saw reality standing at the gate.

Since that day, interrupted only by the fevers and doubts of love, she had accepted with joy her predestined fate as the visible mate of Gregory Compton. Else what did it all mean? She had counted on marriage, but that respectable solution had faded into utter insignificance as soon as the shock of Ida’s refusal had passed. To fling the world aside, to regard it as a mere whirling speck in the void, followed as a matter of course. She and this man would fill all space.

And she had lost. It was over. _Over. Over._ For a time the astonishment consequent upon the mental reiteration of this fact held her. Her mind, quick, alert, sinuous as she had always found it, was unable to readjust itself. How could anything be over that manifestly had been created to go on for ever? What, then, did it all mean: that mutual recognition when they had sat together that night in Butte, that long mental obsession, this later perfect understanding, this indubitable power to find in each other complete happiness? Over. And by the man’s decree. How odd. How odd. And what a tragic waste.

She knew that the mine had pulled him, but she was too much the woman to take a mine seriously. There had been some other reason. He loved her; she never doubted that. He had resisted--why? She groped back through her limited experience, wondering if the trouble were that she had had so little. Life had not begun with her until a year ago. She had been a mere student, deliberately living in the unreal, often deluding, world of books, the worst of all preparations for life.

Some women were independent of experience, knew men by instinct. She felt that Ida, in a similar situation, would have had her way. She had not managed cleverly; no doubt with all her charm and her natural allurement for men, even a certain acquired coquetry, she was one of those women that could theorise brilliantly, but failed utterly to manage their own affairs at critical moments.

She was well aware that she had not been developing along ideal lines of late, particularly since she had come out here with the unadmitted intention of stealing her friend’s husband. By all the laws of tradition she should be wicked all through. Pride, diffidence, fastidiousness--one or all, she was in no condition to decide--had prevented her from playing the deliberate rôle of siren. She sighed and wished that life could be played upon the formula adopted by so many brilliant novelists: a steady unrelenting development of character upon strictly logical lines and by means of cunningly created situations, that was as much like life as a mother’s formula would be for the thoughts and deeds of her children at a given hour a year hence.

Ora did not know that most people in their rare moments of honest introspection find themselves singularly imperfect. She had looked for greater consistency in her complex recesses; assuming that if she made up her mind to take the husband of any woman, and that woman her best friend, she would be wholly hard and wicked, and, for the sake of the result, quite willing to achieve this consistent imperfection. And such hardness would be the surest of all solaces in the event of failure. She felt neither hard nor nearly as wicked as she should, but she did recognise the fact that if she had one more chance she would win by hook or crook.

Her thoughts swung to Ida. What had she said to Gregory in that last decisive interview? Ida was as clever as the devil. She would watch her chance and make just the right appeal at the right moment. Gregory could be ruthless to the woman of whom he had wearied or to the woman he loved, but if his wife played upon his honour, his Western chivalry, his sense of fair play, and reiterated her own rights--to her would he lower his flag if it struck the life out of his own heart, and left himself nothing to feed the deep passion and romance of his nature for the rest of his life.

In any case Ida had won.

Once more Ora wished that she had gone to work when she found herself penniless after her father’s death. She would have developed normally, and it was unthinkable that in the little world of Butte she would not have met Gregory Compton while he was free. Then not only would she be happy today but know nothing of those abysmal depths in her soul which she execrated while yielding to them and lamenting that for the time being they were no worse. Love may be divine when all goes well, or one is born into the cult of the martyr, but when it comes too late to passionate natures associated with virile and accomplished minds, it can be the very spawn of hell. Ora’s regret that she was not of the breed of those finished wantons of history that rose to fame on the shattered hearts of men was born of expediency. Could she have been given her choice and Gregory Compton she would have elected to be fine and noble, consummating the lofty dictates of her superior intellectual endowment. Not yet had she realised that lacking a ruthless centralised ideal, rarely allied to brilliant intellects, the souls of women even more than those of men (who have less time and more poise) are the playthings of Circumstance.

She became aware that her Chinaman was crossing the room, and before she could refocus her wandering mental vision and intercept him, he had opened the front door and admitted Professor Whalen.

XXIII

Ida had broken a dinner engagement and sat alone in her library. She knew that Gregory had passed through Butte that day on his way from Helena to Pony; she had seen him leave the Block where his lawyers had their offices and jump into a waiting taxi. He was not the man to take a cab for anything but an imminent train. She had rushed home, but he had neither called nor telephoned. She reasoned that he would be more than man if he were not reluctant to see her again after their last embarrassing interview, that there was no cause for fresh doubts, and that there was literally nothing for her to do at present but continue to play her waiting game. But she felt both sad and nervous, and wondered if it were in her to despair, to “cut and run” like other women; or whether it might not be wise to absent herself for a time. Gregory was the sort of man to appreciate delicacy, and after an absence of two months they would meet quite naturally. She could visit Yellowstone and Glacier Park, and send him pleasant impersonal postcards.

But although she hesitated to acknowledge it, she was tired of her waiting game, she wished that “fate would get a move on”, and she had left her husband once with unforeseen results. She leaned her elbows on her knees and pressed her hands against her face. She had always cherished a high opinion of her cleverness in regard to men, but she was nonplussed. For a woman of her resource there should be some alternative to waiting. She knew that she had made a deep impression on her husband in that momentous interview, but who could say that he had not deliberately put the memory of it out of his mind? Certainly there was no sign that it had softened him or paved the way for her reinstatement into his life.

She was alarmed at her waning self-control. During these last few days she barely had been able to play her part in society; the people at the various functions she had attended had seemed to her confused and absent mind like marionettes that she could sweep off the stage with her arm, and she had retreated into her shell lest she insult them irreparably.

She brought her heavy brows together. Could there be another woman after all? Gregory was cleverer than any detective. Why should it occur to him to suggest divorce, he a man so absorbed in a mine that he had forgotten how to live--merely out of consideration for a discarded wife whose existence he generally managed to forget? It was certainly odd, and its idiosyncrasies grew and swelled as she brooded. She wondered if she had been a fool. But who in heaven’s name could the woman be? Of course it was only a passing fancy, but could she wait, _could she wait_?

She was aroused by a slight cough, discreet but full of subtle insolence. She sprang to her feet, and Whalen smiled as he saw her drawn face and bloodshot eyes. He stood just within the door, and held a cap in his hand. He wore a light automobile coat; a pair of goggles only half covered his bulging brow. His upper teeth were clamped down over his lower lip, a habit when steadying his nerves. Ida thought she had never seen him look so hideous, so like a mongrel cur.

“What do you want?” she asked.

“How gracious you are! How like Mrs. Blake, who would not forget her manners if she----”

“I’ve got no manners for your sort. Get out.”

“Oh, not yet. I’ve something to say. I’ve waited for over a year, but my time has come----”

“You’ll go out the way you went last time if you don’t say what you’ve got to say pretty quick and get out by yourself.”

Whalen looked over his shoulder nervously, and measured the distance to the front door. He had asked leave of the maid to announce himself, and, when she had disappeared, reopened the door and left it ajar.

“It won’t take me long,” he said grimly. “It took me a little longer to tell Mrs. Blake, for she was hard to convince; but she _was_ convinced before I left. It is merely this: I saw you go into Lord John Mowbray’s rooms on Monday night shortly after ten o’clock and come out at half-past one.”

“Oh, you did, did you? I had a feeling all the time there was a sneak in the neighbourhood. Well, much good your spying will do you. Lord John was at the Country Club until three in the morning and everybody knows it.”

She spoke calmly, but she was profoundly disturbed. She continued, however, in the same tones of cutting contempt, for she saw that he was taken aback, “I merely misunderstood an invitation of Lord John’s for a bridge party. I thought it was for that night, and although I was surprised to find myself the first and Lord John not there, I sat down to wait and fell asleep. I had had a hard day. I only condescend to explain,” she continued witheringly, “because you are as venomous as a mad dog and it is as well to muzzle you at once.”

“I don’t believe a word of that yarn, and neither will anyone else. I certainly managed to convince Mrs. Blake----”

“Not she. She must have laughed in your face----”

“Oh no! Not Mrs. Blake! But I will admit that it was not easy to make her believe ill of you. Perhaps I should not have succeeded, but when a woman is eager to believe----” He laughed and shrugged his shoulders; but once more he cast a quick glance at the line of retreat. The heavy library table was between them.

“What the devil do you mean?” Ida spoke roughly, but her heart began to hammer. She felt a sudden impulse to run away, but she stood rigidly and glared at him. “Here!” she continued, “come to the point. Spit out your poison. What particular object had you in trying to set my best friend against me? It would have been more like you to run to a newspaper.”

“That later. I wanted to do Mrs. Blake a good turn and at the same time let her be the one to tell your husband that he could secure his freedom without further delay----”

“What do you mean? What do you mean?” Ida’s eyes were staring as if they saw a vision of herself at the stake; she tossed off her pride as she would a hampering cloak. “Ora! Ora! Oh, not Ora! You liar!” she screamed. “Prove what you said quick----” But he saw that she had caught the edge of the table and that her body was swaying.

“Oh, neither will deny it now,” he replied in a tone of deadly quiet. “She went out there to be near him, no doubt of that; and he’s spent hours on end in that bungalow. I went to Helena and back with him and I guessed that something was up, for he was glummer and more disagreeable than usual; and this afternoon when I saw her come up out of his mine I guessed they had had a painful scene and parted. So I told her she had the game in her own hands, and that I’d go on the stand and swear to what I saw. No husband would believe anything but the truth, nor this town either. You might prove that your lord made a fool of you and amused himself elsewhere, but you’re done for all the same; and I guess Mr. Compton would manage his divorce all right. Then two people that are madly in love will be happy----”

Ida’s strength rushed back and the world turned scarlet. She picked up a heavy bronze from the table and hurled it at him. But Whalen was expecting a physical assault in some form. He ducked and fled. When she reached the open door he was not in sight.

XXIV

Ora watched the clock until twenty minutes after eleven.

The miners changed shift promptly, and the last should have gone down the Primo shaft by a quarter past at the latest. The shaft house would be empty, as no hoisting was being done on the night shift.

She turned out the light in her living-room, wrapped herself in a dark lodenmantel, a long cape with a hood that she had worn while climbing in Bavaria, and let herself out. She walked through the grove to the edge of the bluff above her camp and stood for a few moments, listening intently. Some ten minutes since she had heard the warning shriek of an automobile horn, but the garage of her manager, who had motored Whalen into Butte, was on the flat, and he had had time either to go down into the mine or climb to his own cottage.

The moon was at the full and the scene as sharply outlined as by day, although less animated. Save for the usual raucous noises of a mining camp the only sign of life was in the saloon. Some one was playing a pianola, and through the open door she saw men standing at the bar. For a moment she was tempted to take the surface path across the camps; but the risk was too great. Some one was sure to be abroad, and although she had been willing to brave the scorn of the world when there was no apparent alternative, she shrank from the plain Saxon the miners would use if they saw her. From Gregory’s shaft house she could reach his cabin by the path behind the abandoned cut.

A light was burning in her shaft house. She was not expert enough to descend the ladder candle in hand, and for a moment faltered above the darkness of the well; she had not been down before at night. Then she reflected that it was always night in the mines and descended without further hesitation.

At the foot of the shaft the usual station was one with the chamber left after removing the first large deposit of ore. They had merely cut through the vein at this point without stoping, and the great excavation had a lofty roof. Ora struck a match and lit a candle near by. On the day of the geologists’ visit a number of miner’s candlesticks had been thrust into what little wood there was in the chamber, and the candles were but half burnt out. Then she lit the one she had brought in her pocket. Accustomed as she was by this time to the route underground by chamber and gallery to the Perch mine, she always picked her way carefully, particularly down the first drift; her lessees, impatient at the leanness of the connecting vein, and not wishing to spend either the time or the money to sink the shaft another hundred feet, had understoped, and the holes were ill-covered.

She crossed the large black cavern toward the first of these tunnels, or drifts, sweeping the candle about her head, and then holding it downward, for she always feared cave-ins. The room was almost untimbered, owing to the hardness of the rock.

She had almost reached the mouth of the drift, when she paused suddenly, listened intently, and then blew out her candle. Some one was on the ladder. It was one of the miners, no doubt. Something had detained him above ground, and not daring to summon the shaft house man, he was sneaking down the ladder. He would go on down to the second level of the mine. Ora stood motionless, her hood pulled over her white face. Her miners were good average men, but the saloon flourished, and was no doubt responsible for the present delinquency.

Then once more she listened intently. The upper part of her body stiffened like a startled animal’s. Whoever was coming down was making his first descent by foot; not only was his progress slow, but he was breathing heavily, and hesitating between rungs, as if it were his first experience of an inclined ladder. Miners hate the shaft ladder, and will resort to any subterfuge to avoid it, but they are experts in “negotiating” it nevertheless. No doubt this was some green hand, recently employed. Or possibly the man was drunk.

Then suddenly Ora turned cold with the chill of the mine itself, a mere physical attribute that her warm blood had never deigned to notice before. A form was slowly coming into view below the high roof of the cavern, and although it was little more than a blot on the general blackness, Ora’s keen eyes, accustomed to the faint relief given by the candle near the shaft, noted as it descended further that it covered more of the ladder than it should. Miners are almost invariably thin and they wear overalls. This person wore a heavy cape like her own. But it was not alone the garment, which any miner would scorn, that betrayed the sex of the invader; it may have been the physical awkwardness, the shallow breathing, or some subtle psychical emanation--or all--that warned Ora of the approach not only of a woman but of a malignant force.

And this woman was following her. There was no doubt in her mind of that. She suffered a moment or two of furious unreasoning terror as she crouched against the wall and watched that shadow against a shadow slowly descend the final rungs of the ladder. Her first impulse had been to flee down the drift, but there was danger of falling into one of the gouge holes and disabling herself. She dared not relight her candle.

Shaking, terrified as she never had been in her life--for she was normally brave, and it was not a normal woman she feared but that aura of hate and lust for vengeance--undecided, putting up a frantic prayer that Gregory would come to her rescue, she pulled the hood over her face and almost sank to her knees. The woman, breathing heavily, reached the last rung and touched the ground as warily as a cat. For a moment she stood drawing in deep breaths like sighs, but which escaped, to tormented ears, like a hiss. Ora, her eyelids almost meeting over the intense concentration of her gaze, saw the woman fling back the mantle that covered her, throw out her arms as if to relax the muscles after the strain of the descent. Then she turned suddenly, snatched the candlestick from the wall and held it above her head.

For the moment Ora thought her heart had stopped. The woman was Ida. Her heavy lowered brows were like a heavy band across the white ghastliness of her face. Her eyes glittered horribly. Her lips were a mere tight line. Her black hair, loosened, fell over her face. Ora’s hypnotised gaze tore itself from those slowly moving eyes and lowered itself instinctively to Ida’s right hand. It held the stiletto she had given her in Genoa. The slanting rays of the candle fell on the jewels of the hilt. Then she knew that Ida had followed her down into the mine to kill her.

Her courage came back as quickly as it had fled. Ora’s brain might be democratic but her soul was haughty. The friendship of the past eighteen months between herself and this woman suddenly shaped itself as forced and artificial, and she was filled with a cold surprise and anger. _Who_ was Ida Hook that she should presume to question Ora Stratton? Similar reflections, no doubt, stiffened many a noble when on his way to the guillotine at the behest of the _canaille_.

Ora was beyond the ray of the candle at present but Ida was beginning to move forward, her eyes almost blank in spite of their brilliancy, moving from side to side, striving to pierce the darkness, her head bent forward to catch the slightest sound. It was evident that she had seen Ora go into the shaft house, and knew that she could not be far off.

Ora took the automatic from the bag at her waist, pointed it at the roof of the cave and fired twice. The din was terrific in that confined space. Ida shrieked, dropped the stiletto and candle, and flung her arms about her head. Ora hastily lighted two other candles, and then retreated against the wall. She believed that the terrible inhibition in Ida’s tormented mind was shattered, but she kept the automatic in her hand, nevertheless.

The reverberations died away and once more the mine was as silent as only a deserted level of a mine can be. Ida raised her head and saw Ora. She gave a strangled cry and moved forward a step. Then her arms fell heavily to her side. She did not even pick up the dagger. The inhuman tension of her mind relaxed, the body barely had force enough to hold itself together.

“I came here to kill you,” she said. “But I can’t do it. I’ve been mad for hours, and I wish I could have found you in bed as I thought I would. I could have killed you then. But I saw you come down here--Have you told him?”

“No. He was down in the mine until eleven. I was on my way to tell him--to break down his resistance tonight!”

“His resistance?” Ida raised her head. She had lost the pitch necessary for murder, but her mind began to recover its alertness and her drooping body to set its springs in motion. “What do you mean by that? I thought he was in love with you.”

Ora laughed. She was filled with an utter despair, but the knife was still in Ida and she could turn it round. “Oh, yes, make no doubt of that. He loves me and will as long as he lives----”

“Not much he won’t!” roared Ida. “If I’ve been too quick for you you’ll never tell him now, and he practically gave me his word the other day that he’d never even ask me for a divorce again. That means you go and go quick, and if you think Gregory will have nothing to do but sit down and nurse your memory----”

The blood flew to Ora’s head and she hastily dropped the automatic into her bag. “I’ll not go!” she said. “And what is more I shall tell him. When Gregory knows that you spent three hours in Mowbray’s rooms at night----”

“Mowbray was not there! He was at the Country Club----”

“_Was_ he?”

“Yes, and it can be proved. Moreover, you know me well enough----”

“It doesn’t matter what can be proved or what I believe. You waited for Mowbray--Do you suppose that Gregory--or any court of law----”

“My God!” cried Ida. “You! You! I think it was that drove me off my head more than the prospect of disgrace and losing Gregory. You! What in God’s name is possessing you? I always knew that you would be the concentrated essence of all damn fool women that ever lived when you did fall in love, but I never believed it was in you to do anything dishonourable----”

“And would you have believed that you, the concentrated essence of all that is cool, deliberate, calculating, would ever be inspired to commit murder? And for a man? What’s the use of talking? People possessed by love either are wholly themselves while it lasts, or are abnormal and should not be held accountable even to the law. I suppose this means that you too love Gregory Compton?”

“Yes it does!” cried Ida, the more vehemently because it shamed her to put this unwonted weakness into words. “I do, damn it all! I do. I thought I was immune, but I guess we are all born with the microbe and it bites when the soil is good and ready.” Her anger had vanished, for in spite of Ora’s defiance she knew that she was master of the situation. She kicked the stiletto contemptuously aside, clasped her hips with her large firm hands and threw back her shoulders. “Now!” she said, “admit right here that you know I didn’t go to Mowbray’s rooms for any old intrigue. That kind of thing isn’t in me and you know it.”

“I will confess I was surprised--I refused to believe it at first--Oh, I suppose I don’t. But it doesn’t matter----”

“Are you ready to come with me this minute to Gregory and tell him that yarn--knowing that I can prove Mowbray wasn’t there--I say _go with me_--not by yourself.”

Ora made no reply. She was beaten but she was not ready to admit it.

“You may bet your life on one thing,” continued Ida. “You go with me or you don’t go at all, for I’ll stick to you like wet paint until this thing is settled once for all. Now just tell me what you meant a while back by Gregory’s resistance? When you found I wouldn’t consent to a divorce--of course you put him up to ask me, you traitorous little white devil--did you want him to elope with you?”

“Yes I did!”

“And he wouldn’t!”

“He--he would not sacrifice me----”

“Shucks! Where did you want him to go? To Europe?”

“Yes.”

“Good Lord! And what did you think you were going to do with him over there? Spoon in orange groves for forty years?”

“There are several thousand resources in Europe besides orange groves--but you would never understand----”

“Oh, don’t I understand? It’s I that does understand, not you, or you would never have made such an asinine proposition to Gregory Compton. Why on earth didn’t you propose some place with _mines_--Mexico, Alaska, China--Then you might have stood some show--but Europe--Gregory--Do you remember those American business men that always looked as if they had left their minds in an office at the top of a thirty-story building, and their bodies were being led round by a string? The vision of Gregory astray in Europe for the rest of his life would be funny if it weren’t so pathetic. Talk about the conceit of man. It isn’t a patch on that of a woman when she gets the bug inside her head that she can be ‘everything’ to a man. I can manage Gregory till doomsday when I get him back, but you’d lose him inside of six months no matter which way you got him----”

“That couldn’t be true! I recognised that he was mine--_mine_--the night we met before I left----”

“What’s that?”

“Oh, yes, I met him once before I went abroad with you--we talked for an hour----”

“And he was the man you wrote those letters to in Europe----”

“Yes.”

“And I your most intimate friend!”

“I never sent them, and you did not care for him then----”

“Oh, I don’t see you apologising if you had turned heaven into hell. You made up your mind then to have him, I suppose?”

“No. And not even when I came out here. I only wanted to be with him--know him a little better--have that much--Oh, I couldn’t make you understand any more than that I can suffer as much as if I were the best of women who had lost her husband by death. It was only after Mowbray came--there seemed a prospect----”

“Well, I don’t know that I blame you so much, for I certainly bluffed it pretty well. I can forgive you for that but not for meaning to make me out a strumpet and send me to the muck heap, disgraced for the rest of my life. Well, come along. Let us go straight to Gregory and let him decide.”

Ora did not move.

“It’s either that or you go back to Butte with me tonight and start for Europe tomorrow morning.”

“I know when I am beaten. I will leave. And don’t imagine that you have won because you are in the right. We have emerged from the dark ages of superstition, and we know that the wicked are not punished if they are strong enough. Nor are the virtuous rewarded for mere virtue--not once in ten thousand times. You have won because you are stronger than I. That is all.”

“It’s enough for me.”

Ora laughed. “Do you really believe that you can win him back? He’ll not forget me, because I can always fire his imagination. He is as indifferent to you as only a man can be when the woman is an old story.”

“That was a nasty one! But I’m not worrying. I have been at a disadvantage since I got back, thinking my only rival was a hole in the ground. But take this from me, Ora: when a woman knows where she stands, and has the inside track, and has her nerve with her, the man has no show whatever. Nor the other woman. I’ll get him back all right. And he’ll forget you. That’s a man’s long suit.”

“We’ll neither of us ever know, so it doesn’t matter. I shall never see him again. That is all that matters to me.”

“And Valdobia?”

“I shall marry him. I suppose--after a while.”

“I don’t mind saying that he is much too good for you.”

“Possibly. And he’ll love me the more.”

“And shall you tell him of this little interlude?”

“Certainly not.”

“Well, I always have maintained that the woman who confessed anything to a man was a fool, but it certainly is a queer mix up.”

“I don’t know that I should so much mind telling him, after all. Men are too practical to resent any but the literal infidelity. And he is the only person living that understands me. Gregory does not and never would care to. Why could not I have had this madness for the one man who is really fitted to be my mate--whose ideas of life are my own, who has so much the same order of mind? Why should I love Gregory Compton, a man I not only cannot marry, but with whom I never could find a real companionship. My God! Why? Why?”

“There are several ways of getting ahead of life,” said Ida drily, “and one is not asking ‘Why’ too often. That’s just one of her little traps to keep you discontented. You and Gregory Compton! It certainly is funny. What did you talk about anyway?”

Ora threw out her arms and laughed wildly. “Ores. Ores. Ores. I tried to interest him in many of the things that interested me. He didn’t even try to understand what I was driving at. One night I offered to read to him--I had a lively new volume of memoirs in mind--he asked if I had any work on copper. I read to him for three hours from a book called ‘The Copper Mines of the World,’ technicalities and all. Of course he had read it before, but it seemed to delight him. We literally had no common meeting ground but ores, but we loved each other madly. Oh, don’t tell me that it was mere passion!” she broke out as angrily as if Ida had interrupted her. “Valdobia is attractive in far more ways and better looking. Gregory has met many women.--If that were all we should have bored each other long since--we never could have held each other’s imaginations while apart.--I tell you it is some deep primary bond--something that older races perhaps could explain. Why should we meet at all in this life----”

“I guess when we understand all the different brands of love we’ll vaccinate and be immune. Shut your teeth, Ora, and take your medicine. And for heaven’s sake let us get out of this damp hole. I’ll help you and Custer pack and we’ll go to Butte in the car I came out in. Have I got to go up that ladder!”

“No, we’ll go over to the Perch mine and ring for the skip there. My engineer is not on duty during the ‘graveyard shift.’”

XXV

On the following morning Ida, having seen Ora on the train bound for Chicago, went at once to a public garage, rented the touring car she had used the night before, and was driven out to the mines. She walked up to the cabin on the crest of Perch of the Devil and, finding it empty, summoned a miner who was lounging near and bade him call Mr. Compton. The man asked to be allowed to use the telephone in the office, obtained connection with the second level of the mine, and announced in a few moments that the boss was on his way up.

Ida, who had dropped wearily into a chair, merely nodded as Gregory entered. He was as pale as a dark man can be, and his voice when he spoke sounded as if he had been running.

“What is it?” he demanded. “Has anything happened----”

“To Ora? Nothing, except that she is on her way East and to Europe. Tired, no doubt, but quite well.”

Gregory drew a short sigh of relief, and sat down before his table, shading his eyes with his hand. “Well?” he asked. “What is it?”

“I haven’t come out here to make a scene, or even to reproach you. I believe that I should have the self-restraint to ignore the subject altogether if it were not for that man, Whalen. Some one must put an extinguisher on him at once and you are the one to do it. That is why I am obliged to tell you that I found out yesterday about you and Ora. I had begun to believe there must be some woman in the case but I had not the least suspicion of Ora. I not only believed her to be the soul of honour, but I thought she was really in love with the Marchese Valdobia, a Roman who has everything to offer that a woman of her type demands, and to marry whom she had demanded a divorce from Mark. She has been tacitly engaged to him ever since we left Europe.”

Ida saw the muscles in Gregory’s long body stiffen as if he were about to spring, and his eyes glitter through the lattice of his fingers. But he made no comment, and after giving him time to assimilate her information, she added more gently:

“Console yourself with the reflection that she would have thrown him over for you. But she knows now what a mistake she would have made. Ora is one of those atavistic Americans that are far more at home in Europe than in the new world. She has gone where she belongs and Valdobia is her man.”

She paused again. He was still silent, and she continued less fluently: “Now I come to the unpleasant part for myself. To begin at the beginning: I made an enemy of little Whalen before I went abroad. He had the sublime impudence to kiss me one day, and I simply took him by the back of his neck and the seat of his pants and threw him out of the window. He has had it in for me ever since.”

In spite of the various emotions raging within him, Gregory laughed aloud at the picture. The atmosphere felt clearer. Ida went on with more confidence:

“Of course you know that Lord John Mowbray followed me here. He wanted me to get a divorce and marry him, as Valdobia had planned with Ora. I liked him well enough, but even if I had been free it never would have occurred to me to marry him, and no one knew better than he that I didn’t care a copper cent for him. His hope after he came here--a hope in which he was encouraged by Ora--was that, as you were so loudly indifferent, pride might drive me to leave you and make a brilliant marriage. Well, I was tempted for a moment. It was on the night of the day I had been down in the mine with you. I believed that I had given myself away absolutely, offered myself and been refused as casually as if I had been some woman of the streets; told you almost in so many words that I loved you and been invited with excruciating politeness to go to the devil.

“Well, that night I nearly went off my head. I had a whole mind, for a few moments, to ring up Mowbray and tell him that I would get my freedom and leave the country for ever. But that passed. I couldn’t have done it, and I knew it, in spite of the blood pumping in my head. I went out for a walk, for I had smashed a few things already. Then the mad impulse came to me to call on Mowbray. I knew that I’d treat him no better than I had treated Whalen if he so much as tried to kiss me. But I wasn’t afraid. He was too keen on marrying me to take any risks. What I wanted was to do something real devilish--to be more elegant, something quite the antithesis of all that is _comme il faut_. So I went. Mowbray wasn’t there. He had gone to the dance at the Country Club. I sat down to wait for him and fell asleep. When I awoke it was after one o’clock and I was still alone. I can tell you I got out pretty quick. I had slept the blood out of my head and I felt like a fool. I bribed the Jap not to tell Mowbray or anyone else.

“Well, the point of all this is--and the only reason I have told you--Whalen saw me go in and waited for me to come out. He believed that he had found his chance for revenge at last. No doubt he would have told you on the way to Helena, but he hasn’t the spunk of a road agent at the wrong end of a gun. So he took his tale to Ora when he got back.--But before I go any further I want you to say that you believe I had no wrong motive in going to Mowbray’s rooms. Of course a hundred people could testify that he did not leave the Country Club until three o’clock, but that is not the point with you.”

“I believe you,” said Gregory. He was intensely interested.

Ida drew a long sigh and the colour came back to her face. Her eyes, heavy with fatigue, sparkled. “Well! Whalen was all for drinking his cup of revenge down to the dregs. It wasn’t enough to spring a mine under me, he must see what I looked like when it blew up the first time. After he told Ora he posted into Butte and managed to get into my house unannounced--that maid has been fired. I was in the library on the other side of the room. The doorway was good enough for him. He told me. Some time I’ll tell you all I felt. After he had lit out with the Venus of Milo flying after him, I went stark mad. I made up what mind I had left to kill Ora and kill her quick.”

“What?” Gregory sat up and stared at her, his eyes wide open. And, astounded as he was, the immortal vanity of man thrilled responsively to the reckless and destructive passions he had inspired in these two remarkable women.

“I got a touring car and arrived at the foot of her hill--a little after eleven it was, I guess. There was a light in her living-room, and I made up my mind to wait until I was sure she was alone and in her bedroom. Then I intended to get in somehow or other and kill her with that stiletto she gave me in Genoa. It was a notion of hers that I had been one of the wicked dames of the Renaissance, and I just naturally took the hint. While I was waiting the light went out and almost immediately I saw her hurry down the path that led to her claim and go into her shaft house. I knew on the instant that she was going to you, and that she took that route to avoid being seen. My mind could grasp that much in spite of the fixed idea in it--that she was on her way to tell you Whalen’s story. This was true as I found out afterwards. She went that night, partly because she couldn’t keep it any longer, partly because she wanted to tell you when you were alone in your cabin at night and she could also bind you hand and foot with that Lorelei hair of hers. It takes the hyper-civilised super-refined Oras to stick at nothing when their primitive instincts loosen up.

“Well--I went into the shaft house, and listened until I no longer could hear her on the ladder. Then I followed. Glory! Shall I ever forget going down that ladder? I felt as if every muscle in my body were being torn up by the roots; and I had to carry the stiletto between my teeth. And pitch dark. All my clothes in the way every step. It was enough to take the starch out of tragedy, and I guess it would have flattened me out if it hadn’t been just the one thing that could make me madder still.

“I’ll give you the details of that scene some other time. I’m too tired now. It is enough to say that she had a pistol and made such an infernal racket with it--shooting at the roof--that something busted in my head and I came to. Then we had it out. She agreed to leave because she knew me too well to believe I had gone to Mowbray’s rooms for any horrid purpose, and he hadn’t been there anyway. I told her that if she told you it would have to be before me, and she knew that she couldn’t brazen it through. So I packed her and got her off this morning. That means that I had no sleep last night.”

She stood up and Gregory rose also. “Now, there are two things more,” she said with no lack of decision in her voice, whatever her fatigue of body. “You must settle Whalen, and you must move to Butte and live in my house, even if you are only there once or twice a week. Whalen, the moment he discovers that Ora has gone, will run about Butte defaming me, or carry the story to the papers. It wouldn’t do me much good to prove that Mowbray wasn’t there. People like to believe the worst, and in time would forget that Mowbray had been at the Club on that particular night. My set might be all right. But the rest--and my servants--and Ruby and Pearl! They always use the word ‘bad,’ and, as Ora says, an intrigue is only decent in a foreign language. It gives me the horrors to think of it. But if we are seen together twice a week, and you are known to be living in the house, however often you must be absent, nobody will listen to a story that is not headed toward the divorce court.”

“I’ll buy Whalen’s claim and tell him to get out of Montana. He’ll go! As for the rest of your programme--please be sure, Ida, that I stand ready to protect you now and always. You are not only my wife but an extraordinary woman, and I am very proud of you.”

“Oh, the extraordinary woman hasn’t been born yet, in spite of the big fight the sex is putting up,” said Ida lightly, as they left the cabin and walked down the hill. “When women really are extraordinary they will be just as happy without men as they now want to be with them. They try with all their might to be hard, and they can ring outside like metal, but inside they are just one perpetual shriek for the right man to come along--that is all but a few hundred thousand tribadists. But they’ve made a beginning, and one day they’ll really be able to take men as incidentally as men take women. Then we’ll all be happy. Don’t you fool yourself that that’s what I’m aiming at, though. I’m the sort that hangs on to her man like grim death.”

“You’re all right!” said Gregory, who, man-like, was automatically readjusting himself to the inevitable.

He handed her into the tonneau of the car, and tucked the robe about her. She gave his hand a hearty friendly shake, for she was much too wise and too tired for sentiment. “Don’t you worry about Ora,” she said. “Custer is with her and she has the drawing-room, and is probably sound asleep at this moment. It must be very restful to get a tragic love affair off your chest.”

And then the car rolled off and she fell asleep at once.