undered in his first words to the beginning of dangerous
heights, and his pulses gave a wild throb when he glanced up at her
and saw a light in her face, in her eyes, in her whole attitude, that
he had never surprised there before. Words, unuttered, leaped hotly
from his heart; a mad desire to tell of his love, of the visions he
had seen in the air, on the blue of the peaks, in the cool shadows of
the forests, in the black depths hundreds of feet under the ground. Of
how the Croix d'Or had come to represent, not financial success, but a
battle for her, and his love.

His face went white, and he bit his dry, twisting lips, and clenched
his hands until they hurt.

"Not now!" he savagely commanded himself. "Not now!"

She appeared to be thinking of something she had to say, and her first
words rendered him thankful that he had held his tongue, otherwise he
might never have known the depths of the girl seated there by his
side.

"I don't want you to think me forward," she said quietly; "but I have
wanted for the last two days to ask you something. It makes it easier
now that I know you know, that--that I care for it. What are
your--your--how are your finances?"

She had stammered it out at last, and, now that the conversation had
been led in that direction, he could speak. He sat there quietly, as
if by a comrade, and told her all. Told her of his boyhood, his
father's death, and that he, in his own right, had nothing in the
world but youth and a half-ownership in the Croix d'Or, which
threatened to prove worthless. He voiced that dread of wasting his
backer's money when he had none of his own to put with it, meeting
dollar for dollar as it was thrown into the crucibles of fate. He
stopped at last, a little ashamed of having so completely unbosomed
himself, for he was by habit and nature reticent.

"You have made it a great deal easier for me," she said, with an
assumption of gayety. "I can say what I've been thinking of for two
days without spludging all over my words."

She laughed as if in recollection of her previous embarrassment, and
again became seriously grave, and went on:

"They say my father is a hard man. At times I have been led to believe
it; but he has been a good father to me, and I appreciate it and his
worries more, after a four years' absence in an Eastern school,
and--well, perhaps because I am so much older now, and better able to
judge leniently. I have never known much of his business from h