gain, help to defeat the Utah company?

He put it that way in decent self-respect. Also he assured himself
that the personal equation as between two lovers of one and the same
woman was entirely eliminated. But who can tell which motive it was
that prompted him to turn aside before he came to the army of toilers
at the slide: to turn and cross the stream and make as wide a detour
as the nature of the ground would permit, passing well beyond call
from the other side of the canyon?

The detour took him past the slide in silent safety, but it did not
take him immediately back to the Rosemary. Instead of keeping on down
the canyon on the C. G. R. side, he turned up the gulch at the back of
Argentine and spent the better half of the afternoon tramping beneath
the solemn spruces on the mountain. What the hours of solitude brought
him in the way of decision let him declare as he sets his face finally
toward the station and the private car.

"I can't do it: I can't turn traitor to the kinsman whose bread I eat.
And that is what it would come to in plain English. Beyond that I have
no right to go: it is not for me to pass upon the justice of this
petty war between rival corporations."

Ah, William Calvert! is there no word then of that other and far
subtler temptation? When you have reached your goal, if reach it you
may, will there be no remorseful looking back to this mile-stone where
a word from you might have taken the fly from your pot of precious
ointment?

The short winter day was darkening to its close when he returned to
the Rosemary. By dint of judicious manoeuvering, with a too-fond
Bessie for an unconscious confederate, he managed to keep Virginia
from questioning him; this up to a certain moment of climaxes in the
evening.

But Virginia read momentous things in his face and eyes, and when the
time was fully ripe she cornered him. It was the old story over again,
of a woman's determination to know pitted against a truthful man's
blundering efforts to conceal; and before he knew what he was about
Calvert had betrayed the Rajah's secret--which was also the secret of
the cipher telegrams.

Miss Carteret said little--said nothing, indeed, that an anxious
kinsman lover could lay hold of. But when the secret was hers she
donned coat and headgear and went out on the square-railed platform,
whither the Reverend Billy dared not follow her.

But another member of the Rosemary group had more courage---or fewer
scrupl