arquetry with a few fine skins from British
Columbia spread upon it here and there, and the dainty, spindle-legged
chairs, the little tables, the cabinets and the Watteau figures were,
he fancied, either of old French manufacture or excellent copies. The
big basement heater had apparently been extinguished, but a snapping
wood-fire blazed upon the English pattern hearth, and, for the light
was fading outside, it flung an uncertain, flickering radiance about
the room. Weston, sitting down, contrasted its luxury with the grim
bareness of his match-boarded cubicle in the boarding-house, and with
the log shanties of the railroad and logging camps. He frowned as he
did so, for all that his eyes rested on made unpleasantly plain the
distinction between himself and the girl whose room it evidently was.

Then he rose as she came in, attired in a long, trailing dress that
rustled as she moved. It seemed to become her wonderfully, and he
became conscious of a faint embarrassment. He had not seen her dressed
in that fashion before, and, after the years that he had spent in
lonely bush and noisy railroad camp, her beauty and daintiness had an
almost disconcerting effect on him. She drew a low chair a little
nearer the hearth, and, sinking into it, motioned to him to be seated.

"My father is busy, and Nellie Farquhar will not be down for a little
while," she said. "We shall probably have half an hour to ourselves,
and I want you to tell me all that you have been doing since we left
you."

Weston understood that she meant to resume their acquaintance--though
he was not sure that was quite the correct word for it--at the point
at which it had been broken off, and he was rather glad that she asked
him what he had been doing. It was a safe topic and naturally one on
which he could converse, and he felt that any silence or sign of
constraint would have been inadmissible.

"Oh," he said, "we went up to look for the mine again."

"You were not successful?"

"No," said Weston. "It was winter, and we had rather a rough time in
the ranges. In fact, I got one foot frost-bitten, and was lame for
some while afterward. It was the one I cut, which probably made it
more susceptible."

His face hardened a trifle as he recalled the agony of the march back
through the snowy wilderness, and the weeks he had afterward spent,
unable to set his foot to the ground, in the comfortless log hotel of
a little desolate settlement.

"Wasn't it rather