the whole thing had been so quick I could not have sworn she had been
there at all. I was honestly dazed as I walked up the rough path to
Wilbraham's and my shack. I must have stood in front of it a good five
minutes, with my wet clothes freezing as hard as a board, and the noise
of the men in the bunk house down by the mine coming up to me on the
night wind.

"'If I be I, as I should be, I've a little dog at home, and he'll know
me,'" I said to myself at last like the old woman in the storybook, only
with a grin. For when I went into the house there would be the neglected
living room with the smelly stove, and Wilbraham walking up and down
there as usual; and Dudley Wilbraham's conversation would bring any man
back to his senses, even if he needed it worse than I did. I opened the
shack door and went in,--and in the bare passage I jerked up taut.

The living room faced me,--and there was no stove in it. And no
Wilbraham, walking up and down and talking to himself. There was a
glowing, blazing log fire in a stone fireplace that must have been built
while I was away; and, sitting alone before it, exactly as I had always
thought of her, was my dream girl,--that I had meant to hunt the world
for to welcome me home!

CHAPTER II

MY DREAM: AND DUDLEY'S GIRL

All I could do was to stand in the living room doorway and stare at her.

There she sat by the fire, in a short blue skirt that showed her little
feet in blue stockings and buckled shoes, and a blue sweater whose
rolling collar fell away from the column of her soft throat. And she was
just exactly what I had known she would be! There was a gold crest to
every exquisite, warm wave of her bronze hair; her level eyebrows were
about five shades darker, and her curled-up eye-lashes darker still,
where she sat with her head bent over some sort of sewing. And even
before she looked up and I saw her eyes, the beauty of her caught me at
my heart. I had never thought even my dream girl could be as lovely as
she was. But there was more to her face than beauty. It was so young and
sweet and gay, and--when you looked hard at her--so sad, that I forgot I
ought either to speak up or go away. Of who she was or how she came to
be at La Chance, I had no earthly clue. I knew, of course, that it was
she who had met me at the landing, and common sense told me she had
taken me for some one else: but I had no desire to say so, or to go away
either. And suddenly she looked up an