ing the lamp?" he said softly, surprised to catch
her expression of saucy humor.

"Oh, please may I speak?" she inquired. "I don't want to annoy you, but
I am simply dying to talk."

He had forgotten his own injunction.

"Let us first examine our mine," he said. "If you bring the lamp we can
have a good look at it."

Close scrutiny of the work already done merely confirmed the accuracy
of his first impressions. Whilst Iris held the light he opened up the
seam with a few strokes of the pick. Each few inches it broadened into
a noteworthy volcanic dyke, now yellow in its absolute purity, at times
a bluish black when fused with other metals. The additional labor
involved caused him to follow up the line of the fault. Suddenly the
flame of the lamp began to flicker in a draught. There was an
air-passage between cave and ledge.

"I am sorry," cried Jenks, desisting from further efforts, "that I have
not recently read one of Bret Harte's novels, or I would speak to you
in the language of the mining camp. But in plain Cockney, Miss Deane,
we are on to a good thing if only we can keep it."

They came back into the external glare. Iris was now so serious that
she forgot to extinguish the little lamp. She stood with outstretched
hand.

"There is a lot of money in there," she said.

"Tons of it."

"No need to quarrel about division. There is enough for both of us."

"Quite enough. We can even spare some for our friends."

He took so readily to this definition of their partnership that Iris
suddenly became frigid. Then she saw the ridiculous gleam of the tiny
wick and blew it out.

"I mean," she said, stiffly, "that if you and I do agree to go shares
we will each be very rich."

"Exactly. I applied your words to the mine alone, of course."

A slight thing will shatter a daydream. This sufficed. The sailor
resumed his task of burying the stores.

"Poor little lamp!" he thought. "When it came into the greater world
how soon it was snuffed out."

But Iris said to herself, "What a silly slip that was of mine! Enough
for both of us, indeed! Does he expect me to propose to him? I wonder
what the letter was about which he destroyed as I came back after my
bath. It must have been meant for me. Why did he write it? Why did he
tear it up?"

The hour drew near when Jenks climbed to the Summit Rock. He shouldered
axe and rifle and set forth. Iris heard him rustling upwards through
the trees. She set some water to boil fo