t with me?"

"You'll always measure up with me, Eileen. It is my measuring up with
you that I am afraid of."

"And if I don't just grasp things quickly;--if I can't climb the
mountains of thought and progress as fast as you can,--you won't grow
impatient?"

"No!"

"You'll wait for me, and help me over the boulders, and even if I wish
to sit down and rest for a while, you'll sit down with me and rest
also until I am ready to climb on? You won't run ahead--as so many
husbands do--so far ahead that I shall not be able to catch up?"

"No, dearie, no! Your speed is just going to be my speed unless it is
too much for me, and we'll both get up to the top of the hill
together."

"Kiss me then, Phil,--and let us turn for home. I am happy at
last,--just ever so happy."

"Eileen, I think I'd better come along and make my peace, et cetera,
et cetera, with your dad," said Phil, as they neared Vernock again.
"Does he know anything of our plans?"

"No, Phil! I have told him of our good friendship, but I have been
waiting and waiting in the hope that a chance would come for us to
talk to him when he was not absorbed, body, soul and spirit, in
business and politics. But the time seems to get farther and farther
off than ever. I guess you had better come along now.

"And don't I wish you could advise him to give up his silly notions
for acquiring land. He might listen to you, Phil. You might be able to
induce him to sell part of what he has in order to bolster up what
remains. If a slump of any kind comes, he will be without a prop to
lean on. No man has any right to involve himself in this way, no
matter how good the ultimate prospects may look."

"I can't understand it, Eileen, for it appears to be a kind of
contagious disease, attacking the ablest and otherwise most
business-like men in the Province. Your father is by no means alone."

"I know; Mr. Brenchfield, Mr. Arbuthnot, the Victoria and the
Vancouver political gang,--they are all more or less in it the same
way. I can't think what has come over them. The danger signals ahead
stand out so brightly to me, although I may be wrong. I hope,--oh, I
hope I am!

"They have got to think so much prosperity and progress that they have
hypnotised themselves into believing that it is permanent. And they
all imagine, whatever comes, that they will be able to see before the
man in the street does and so be able to get out from under, leaving
someone else with the load of unrea