n the market, by
sweatshop labor, or adulterated food, or exorbitant rental of filthy
tenements. And I have no illusions about the men I'm dealing with. If
they undertake to make a get-rich-quick scheme of it I'll knock the
whole business in the head. I'm not overly anxious to get into it with
them. But it promises action of some sort--and I have to do something
till spring."

In the spring! That brief phrase set Hazel to sober thinking. With
April or May Bill would spread his wings for the North. There would be
no more staying him than the flight of the wild goose to the reedy
nesting grounds could be stayed. Well, a summer in the North would not
be so bad, she reflected. But she hated to think of the isolation. It
grieved her to contemplate exchanging her beautifully furnished
apartment for a log cabin in the woods. There would be a dreary
relapse into monotony after months of association with clever people,
the swift succession of brilliant little functions. It all delighted
her; she responded to her present surroundings as naturally as a grain
of wheat responds to the germinating influences of warmth and moisture.
It did not occur to her that saving Bill Wagstaff's advent into her
life she might have been denied all this. Indeed she felt a trifle
resentful that he should prefer the forested solitudes to the pleasant
social byways of Granville.

Still she had hopes. If he plunged into business associations with
Jimmie Brooks and Paul Lorimer and others of that group, there was no
telling what might happen. His interests might become permanently
identified with Granville. She loved her big, wide-shouldered man,
anyway. So she continued to playfully rumple his hair and kept her
thoughts to herself.

Bill informed her from time to time as to the progress of his venture.
Brooks and Lorimer put him in touch with two others who were ready to
chance money on the strength of Bill's statements. The company was
duly incorporated, with an authorized capital of one hundred thousand
dollars, five thousand dollars' worth of stock being taken out by each
on a cash basis--the remaining seventy-five thousand lying in the
company treasury, to be held or sold for development purposes as the
five saw fit when work began to show what the claims were capable of
producing.

Whitey Lewis set out. Bill stuck a map on their living-room wall and
pointed off each day's journey with a pin. Hazel sometimes studied the
ma