wish that you should make your mark first?"
she inquired.

"No," answered Nasmyth decisively; "I want you to understand that it
was mine. She merely concurred in it."

He changed the subject abruptly. "Tell me about yourself."

"There is so little to tell. One day is so much like another with me,
only I have been rather busier than usual lately. My father has had to
cut down expenses. We have no hired man."

Nasmyth set his lips and half-consciously closed one hand. It seemed
to him an almost intolerable thing that this girl should waste her
youth and sweetness dragging out a life of unremitting toil in the
lone Bush. Still, while her father lived, there was nothing else she
could look forward to, and he could imagine how the long colourless
years would roll away with her, while she lost her freshness and grew
hard and worn with petty cares and labour that needed a stronger arm
than hers. She might grow discontented, he fancied, and perhaps a
trifle bitter, though he could not imagine her becoming querulous.

As yet there was a great patience in her steady eyes. Then it became
evident that she guessed what he was thinking.

"Sometimes I feel the prospect in front of me is not a very attractive
one," she responded in answer to his thoughts. "Still, one can get
over that by not regarding it as a prospect at all. It simplifies the
thing when one takes it day by day."

She smiled at him. "Derrick, you have done wisely. I think you need a
sustaining purpose and a woman to work for."

Nasmyth's face paled. "Yes," he agreed dryly; "it is, perhaps, rather
a significant admission, but I really think I do."

It was a relief to both of them that Wheeler came floundering along
the shingle just then with a box and a coil of wire in his hand.

"I've brought you a little present, Nasmyth," he announced. "Firing by
fuse is going to be uncertain when there's so much spray about, and I
sent down for this electric fixing. We can charge it for you at any
time at the mill. Have you put in any giant-powder yet?"

Nasmyth said they had not fired a heavy charge about the fall, but
that there were several holes ready for filling, and Wheeler's eyes
twinkled.

"I'm quite anxious to try this little toy," he said. "When I was
young, a rancher gave me an old played-out shot-gun, and I was out at
sun-up next morning to shoot something. That's the kind of being a man
is, Miss Waynefleet. Put any kind of bottled-up power in his hands,