bother over it myself if I were you. I'd let it
go at plain Paulette Brown!"

"If you could," said Marcia, just as drily. And over her words, close
outside the window, a wolf howled.

It startled me, as it had startled me once before that evening, only
this time I knew the reason. "Scott, I never knew the wolves to be
coming out so early in the season!" I was thankful to be back to things
I could exclaim about. "And down here, beside the house, I never saw
any!"

"No; so Dudley said," Marcia returned almost absently. She opened the
door for herself, because I had forgotten it, and stood looking at the
lighted living room at the end of the passage by the front door. "But
the wolves have been round for a week--that was what I meant when I said
I was going to have some wolf hunts! The mine superintendent's going to
take me."

"Thompson!" I let out. Then I chuckled. Marcia was likely to have a
great wolf hunt with Thompson, who knew no difference between a shotgun
and a rifle, and would have legged it from a fox if he had met it alone.
"Marcia Wilbraham, I'll pay you five dollars if you ever get out wolf
hunting with Thompson. Why, the only thing he _can_ do for diversion is
to play solitaire!"

"Oh, him--yes," said Marcia carelessly and without grammar. "But I
didn't mean old Thompson. He's been gone for a month, and we've a new
man. His name's Macartney, and he's been here two weeks."

It was news to me, if it was also an example of the way Dudley Wilbraham
ran his mine. But before I could speak Marcia nodded significantly down
the passage to the living room door. I had been looking into the room
myself, as you do at the lighted stage in a theatre, and I had seen only
one thing in it: my dream girl--whose name might or might not be
Paulette Brown, whom Dudley Wilbraham had more right to than I
had--sitting by the fire as I had left her, that fire I had dreamed I
should come home to, just myself alone, and talking to Dudley. But
Marcia had been looking at something else, and now my gaze followed
hers.

A tall, lean, hard, capable-looking man stood on the other side of the
fire. He was taking no share in the conversation between Dudley and the
girl who had only lived in my dreams till to-night. He was watching the
living room door, quite palpably, and it struck me abruptly that I had
not far to seek for Marcia Wilbraham's reason for staying the winter at
La Chance. But I might have taken more interest in that and i