e answered, with a careless laugh. "No one ever
does, save me. It's an old and favorite view of mine. I used to ride
here, to see the Cross, many years ago, before I went away to school.
So I came back to see my old friend, and--well--your bowlder would
have struck us if my horse hadn't jumped."

She laughed again, and reached a yellow-gauntleted hand down to pat
her mount's shoulder with a soothing caress. The horse stopped
trembling, and looked at Dick with large, intelligent eyes.

"Ah," said Dick, remembering the garrulity of the engineer. "I believe
you must be Miss Presby."

Even as she said simply: "I am, but how did you know? I don't remember
ever seeing you," he took note of her modish blue riding-dress with
divided skirts and patent-leather boots. There was a clean freshness
about her person, a smiling candor in her eyes, and a fine, frank
girlishness in her face that attracted him beyond measure. She
appeared to be about twenty years of age, and was such a girl as those
he had known and danced with, in those distant university days when
his future seemed assured, and life a joyous conquest with all the
odds in his favor. Now she was of another world, for he was, after
all, but a workingman, while she, the daughter of a millionaire
lumberman, would dance and associate with those other university men
whose financial incomes enabled them to dawdle as they pleased through
life. He had no bitterness in this summary, but he sustained an
instant's longing for a taste of that old existence, and the
camaraderie of such girls as the one who sat before him on her horse.

"No," he said, looking up at her, "you never saw me before. I have
been in the Blue Mountains but six weeks. I am Richard Townsend."

Her face took on a look of aroused interest, different from the casual
look she had been giving him in the brief minute of their meeting.

"Oh," she said, "then you must be the Mr. Townsend of the Croix d'Or.
I learned of your arrival last night after I came home. You are
rehabilitating the old mine?"

"Yes," he answered, smiling. "At least we are trying to. As to the
outcome--I don't know."

"You mustn't say that!" she protested. "Faith in anything is the first
requisite for success. That's what it says in the copybooks, doesn't
it?"

She laughed again in her clear, mezzo voice, and then with a
resumption of gravity gathered her reins into a firmer grip, and, as
her horse lifted his head in response to the sum