thickest clothing, labourers, packers, a few Indians,
some youths in extraordinary attempts at evening dress, some negro
minstrels with real dress shirts on and diamond studs, girls with old
velvet skirts and odd bodices that didn't match; and here and there,
idling against the wall, looking on with absent eyes, one could find a
different figure--that of student, or artist, or newspaper
correspondent, or gentleman miner; one need not despair of finding
almost any type of humanity in that room.

Talbot looked at the girl's bright sparkling face as they entered, and
then without a word slipped his arm round her waist and they started
over the rough wooden floor.

"You dance fine," observed Katrine, after a long silence, in which they
had both given themselves up to the pleasure of mere motion. "I guess
you have had lots of practice before you came out here."

Talbot smiled down into her admiring eyes.

"Yes," he said, thinking of the foreign embassies, the English
ball-rooms, the many polished floors his feet had known, "in England."

"My! I expect you're a great swell!" remarked the saloon-keeper's
daughter.

"All the same," he answered, laughing, "I have never had a partner that
danced so perfectly as you do."

"Now that's real kind of you," answered Katrine, with a flush of
pleasure, and then they gave themselves up to silent enjoyment again.

At the end of the dance they came back to Stephen, and found him in the
same corner, watching the room with a doleful sadness on his face.
Katrine, flushed and with sparkling eyes, sat down on the corner of the
step beside him.

"You look so miserable," she said. "Come and have a dance with me to
cheer you up."

"I can't dance," said Stephen, shortly.

"I'll teach you," volunteered Katrine, leaning her chin on her hands and
looking up at him.

Stephen flushed angrily.

"It's not that--my conscience won't allow me to."

"I'll make you forget your conscience," with a very winning smile on her
sweet scarlet lips.

Stephen turned towards her and looked at her with a sudden horror in his
eyes. The girl looked back at him quite undisconcerted and unmoved. She
saw nothing in what she had said. To her, conscience was a tiresome
possession, that might, she knew, trouble you suddenly at any time, and
if any one could succeed in making you forget you had one, he was surely
entitled to your gratitude. Words failed Stephen, he only looked at her
with that silent horror and