elf that I didn't
get."

His gaze happened to turn toward Joyce as he was speaking. He had been
thinking of nothing definite, but at the meeting of their eyes something
flashed into birth and passed from one to the other like an electric
current. Jack knew now something that he wanted, but he did not admit
that he could not get it. If she cared for him--and what else had her
eyes told him in the golden glow of that electric moment?--a hundred
Verinders and Lady Farquhar could not keep them apart.

His heart sang jubilantly. He rose abruptly and left the room because he
was afraid he could not veil his feeling.

Joyce smiled happily. "Where is he going?" she asked innocently.

Moya looked at her and then turned her eyes away. She had understood the
significance of what she had seen and a door in her heart that had been
open for weeks clanged shut.

"I don't know, unless to get the horses," she said quietly.

A few minutes later he returned, leading the animals. From the door of
the shaft-house the Cornishmen watched them mount and ride away. The men
smoked in sullen silence.

[Illustration: THEY RODE THROUGH A WORLD SHOT TO THE CORE WITH SUNLIGHT.
THE SNOW SPARKLED AND GLEAMED WITH IT. (p. 177)]

Before they had ridden a hundred yards Joyce was in gay talk with
Kilmeny. She had forgotten the very existence of the miners. But Moya
did not forget. She had seen the expression of their faces as the horses
had passed. If a chance ever offered itself they would have their
revenge.

It was a day winnowed from a lifetime of ordinary ones. They rode
through a world shot to the core with sunlight. The snow sparkled and
gleamed with it. The foliage of the cottonwoods, which already had
shaken much of their white coat to the ground, reflected it in greens
and golds and russets merged to a note of perfect harmony by the Great
Artist. Though the crispness of early winter was in the air, their
nostrils drew in the fragrance of October, the faint wafted perfume of
dying summer.

Beneath a sky of perfect blue they pushed along the shoulder of the
hill, avoiding the draw into which snow had drifted deep. Life stormed
in their veins, glowed in their flushed cheeks, rang in the care-free
laughter of at least two of them. Jack broke trail, turning often in the
saddle with a lithe twist of his lean muscular body, to suggest a word
of caution at the bad places. Always then he discovered the deep violet
eyes of Joyce Seldon with th