gazing at him for a moment with a sort
of whimsical, mock seriousness, again broke into laughter. "Who would
ever have dreamed of her doing such a thing?" she apostrophized the
ceiling.

"Her!" Hayden felt as if his heart had stopped beating for a moment and
then begun again with slow and suffocating throbs. Perhaps Ydo saw or
guessed something of his emotion, for she again repeated reassuringly:
"It will be all right now within a few hours. You Will see."

"It's going to be dropped," he said in a dull, toneless voice. "It's my
affair, Mademoiselle Mariposa, and you are not going to make the least
move in the matter. Your suspicions--whichever one of my guests they
affect, and I can not even surmise which one you are trying to
implicate--are quite beside the mark. This is entirely my own affair, and
I tell you, we are going to drop it. Do you hear?"

Ydo leaned forward, her chin upon her hand, and surveyed him with a
humorous, unabashed and admiring scrutiny. "Brother in kind if not in
kin, little brother of the wild, you are great. But do you mean what you
say? Are you really willing to run the chance of giving up a fortune to
protect--"

"Nonsense!" he broke in roughly. "Don't go any further. There's no use in
talking the thing over." He again sank into somber silence.

But Ydo was apparently unmoved. "There is one thing I meant to ask you
this afternoon," she said, "but since I shall probably not have an
opportunity to do so I want my curiosity appeased. Why is that mine
called The Veiled Mariposa? Did you happen to find out?"

"Yes," he answered, still entirely without interest. "Because, as the
maps and photographs show, the only way to reach it is by a little hidden
trail just back of a waterfall. You would never suspect it. I happened on
it by the merest chance, followed it, and discovered that the mine lay
behind this mountain cascade."

"Ah, beautiful!" Ydo clapped her hands. "I remember, I am sure, the very
cascade. Although perhaps not, there were many."

"You have been on the ground then?" he asked.

"Ah, yes, with prospectors. But," with a shrug of the shoulders, "we were
not so lucky as you."

"The interview for the afternoon is of course off," he said, rising
heavily and stretching out his hand for his hat.

"I suppose so," conceded Ydo. She smiled and sighed. "The pretty little
coup I had planned is smashed. I have been arranging it for weeks, ever
since I learned that you were interested in