d good night, quietly and without offering him her
hand, did the intimacy of her last questions strike him. He grunted and
lighted a fresh cigar. A number of things occurred to him all at once,
as he slowly made a final round or two of the deck. Then he went to his
cabin and looked over papers which were going ashore at Juneau. These
were memoranda giving an account of his appearance with Carl Lomen
before the Ways and Means Committee at Washington.

It was nearly midnight when he had finished. He wondered if Mary
Standish was asleep. He was a little irritated, and slightly amused, by
the recurring insistency with which his mind turned to her. She was a
clever girl, he admitted. He had asked her nothing about herself, and
she had told him nothing, while he had been quite garrulous. He was a
little ashamed when he recalled how he had unburdened his mind to a girl
who could not possibly be interested in the political affairs of John
Graham and Alaska. Well, it was not entirely his fault. She had fairly
catapulted herself upon him, and he had been decent under the
circumstances, he thought.

He put out his light and stood with his face at the open port-hole. Only
the soft throbbing of the vessel as she made her way slowly through the
last of the Narrows into Frederick Sound came to his ears. The ship, at
last, was asleep. The moon was straight overhead, no longer silhouetting
the mountains, and beyond its misty rim of light the world was dark. Out
of this darkness, rising like a deeper shadow, Alan could make out
faintly the huge mass of Kupreanof Island. And he wondered, knowing the
perils of the Narrows in places scarcely wider than the length of the
ship, why Captain Rifle had chosen this course instead of going around
by Cape Decision. He could feel that the land was more distant now, but
the _Nome_ was still pushing ahead under slow bell, and he could smell
the fresh odor of kelp, and breathe deeply of the scent of forests that
came from both east and west.

Suddenly his ears became attentive to slowly approaching footsteps.
They seemed to hesitate and then advanced; he heard a subdued voice, a
man's voice--and in answer to it a woman's. Instinctively he drew a step
back and stood unseen in the gloom. There was no longer a sound of
voices. In silence they walked past his window, clearly revealed to him
in the moonlight. One of the two was Mary Standish. The man was
Rossland, who had stared at her so boldly in the sm