PART II (continued 3)

“That is about the most cynical thing I ever heard you say.”

“The truth always sounds cynical. You laugh at me for dreaming and being an idealist, but I never have shut my mind to facts as you do.”

“I don’t even blink the old facts. I don’t like them, that’s all. I don’t say, of course, that if I were married to a brute who came home drunk and beat me—but this swapping husbands like horses—well, I’m content to be a brake as long as there’s any wheel to freeze to. You know I’m not hitting at you,” she added hastily. “I’d give you the moon if you wanted it; but I put you in a class by yourself, that’s all.”

“Oh,” cried Ora, laughing. “Let us change the subject before you prove that your logic turns feminine at the crucial test. Heavens! How hideous Butte is. We drove——”

“Hideous? Butte?” demanded Ida indignantly.

“Oh, you see it through the glamour of a triumphal progress. Wait until the novelty has worn off. How do you find it?” she asked Mowbray, who had relished his excellent luncheon and admired his ally’s tactics.

“Rippin’ air. Nearly took a header out of the window this mornin’ thinkin’ I had wings. But as for looks—those mountains in the distance are not half-bad, but the foreground is—er—a little ragged—and—new—you know.” He smiled into Ida’s warning eyes. “Really, dear lady, I can understand that you were keen on gettin’ home again, because home is home, don’t you know. But beauty—tell me just where you do find it.”

Ida tossed her head. “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and mine beholds it. That is enough for me. Now, run along to the Club. I haven’t seen Ora for ages. You may come back for tea.”

She led the way up to her bedroom and they made themselves comfortable and lit their cigarettes.

“Odd as it would seem,” said Ida, “to those east and west of us who have an idea that Butte has been on one prolonged spree since she was really a camp, I have to enjoy my occasional cigarette on the sly. A few of the younger women smoke, when they have locked the doors and pulled the blinds down—and of course The Bunch does; but the majority—and those that never bat an eyelash at cocktails and champagne—think it indecent for a woman to smoke. Funny world.”

“Butte is a provincial hole. As there are no strangers present you needn’t bother to defend it. I’ve just had a brilliant idea. Why don’t you divorce Mr. Compton and marry Mowbray?”

“Aw!” Ida dropped her cigarette and burned a hole in her skirt. “Are you raving crazy?”

“I thought I was advancing a peculiarly level-headed suggestion——”

“None of it in mine!”

“But, my dear Ida, you will tire inevitably of this old camp. The glamour of all this return in a gilded chariot drawn by the cheering populace will wear off in about six months. So will your own novelty for them. It is all indescribably cheap, anyhow. If you send Mowbray away now, he will try to forget you, and forgetting is man’s peculiar accomplishment. You will have missed a great opportunity. You and Mr. Compton are manifestly indifferent to each other. Seize your chance, dear—not only for happiness, but for a splendid social position, before——”

Ora paused. Ida was glaring ahead of her with her heavy black brows pushed low over her flaming eyes. Her lips were drawn back over her sharp little teeth. Her nostrils were distended. She looked like some magnificent beast of the jungle stalking her prey.

“By God!” she whispered, her whole body heaving, “I’ll have him back. I was a fool before I left, and maybe I shouldn’t have left him at all. It’s never safe to leave a man. But when I do get him back he’ll be glad of all I’ve learned. He’s like a lunatic with a fixed idea just now—but wait.”

Ora felt cold and numb. She tried to rise, and wondered if the shock had paralysed her. She managed to articulate: “You love him then?”

But not even to Ora could Ida make any such admission; she who always had flouted both sentiment and passion! She recovered herself and tossed her head.

“Love! Who cares about love? Do you think I’m the sort of woman a man can throw down for a mine? I wouldn’t stand it even it were another woman—but ore! It makes me sick. I won’t be thrown down. And I’ll get him back!”

Ora too had recovered herself. She lit another cigarette. “I’m so glad you don’t care, dear. No man is worth agonising over, as you so often have said yourself. Forgive the doubt. I should have remembered that you were far too clever and worldly-wise for that sort of thing. That is the main reason that I am willing to marry Valdobia: I can be fond of him, like him always, be grateful for his companionship, but he can’t tear my heart out.”

“I thought you told me when you came back that you were mad about him?”

“Oh, I fancy I was strung up that day. When I am excited I always exaggerate. But do think over what I have said about Mowbray. And it would be heavenly to have you in Europe.”

“My mind’s made up. I guess I’m American to my core and marrow. Titles will never seem natural to me, and I guess we’ll both live to see them so tangled up with democracy that those that are left will look like old labels on new cans. No has-beens in mine. Oh, chuck it! What’s this I hear about little Whalen—that he’s resigned from the High and been out in the mountains prospecting since the beginning of Spring? I’ve only seen him once since I came back and then he looked like a viper that had been stepped on.”

“I met him the other day when I was out walking. He bought a claim of one of the prospectors that swarmed out there as soon as they heard of the Primo and the Perch strikes. He wore overalls and a beard. I scarcely knew him. He talked rather wildly about the hill he has located on being another Perch of the Devil.”

“I guess Gregory is responsible for that and a good many other wild dreams. I hear that a lot of young men are coming out from the East this Summer to prospect in those hills. Well, they’ll succeed or fail according to their luck mostly. Let’s go out. You’ve got two hours before your train goes—but if you’ve got a list a yard long——”

And the two sallied forth in perfect peace to shop.

XVII

ORA had more than one cause for uneasiness when she returned to her little home in the pine woods, but paramount was the fear that she should not see Gregory Compton again unless by accident. She rose early after another almost sleepless night and spent a distracted day wandering over the hills, returning at intervals to inquire if her telephone bell had rung. Once more she felt a disposition to run away, anathematising the slavery of love. Only the hope that Mowbray would wear down Ida’s resistance kept her from yielding to the impatient, imaginative, too highly organised woman’s impulse to flee when love seems hopeless and a nervous explosion imminent. She still refused to feel traitorous to Ida, but she did wonder once or twice if she ever should dare to face her as Mrs. Gregory Compton. Ida was the reverse of a fool. She might be blind now, for obvious reasons—but Ora shrugged her shoulders at the vision of Ida’s horror and wrath. What did she care for Ida or any other woman if she got her man?

She made one of her sudden dashes into the house as the telephone bell was ringing. For the moment she thought she was about to faint; then, both appalled and angry at the lawless behaviour of her nerves, she stamped her foot, shook herself, marched over to the telephone, took down the receiver, and asked in a bored voice: “Well?”

“I shall come to supper tonight if you will have me?” Gregory’s tones were those he employed when “canning” a miner.

“Delighted.” Ora’s nerves fell into place like good little soldiers. “Will you be here at seven?”

“About. I prefer to have you tell me here what she had to say.”

“Constitutionally opposed at present, but that was to be expected. Seeds always sprout if well planted and judiciously watered. Our friend from England will do his part.”

“Good. We’ll say no more about it. But I shall go to see you as usual.”

“Why not? We are not fools or children. Any new developments at the mine?”

“Shaft has reached third level. Vein seems to be about the same richness as on the second. Mann is here. Good-bye.”

As Ora, her body no longer braced and rigid, but so filled with the languor of happiness that she wanted to throw herself down on the divan and sleep, crossed the room, she became aware that someone was standing in the outer doorway. His hat was in his hand, and as she focussed her absent gaze she managed to recognise Professor Whalen. Her impulse was to turn her back and run into her bedroom; but Ora was always a great lady. She could be extremely rude to a member of her own class, but she had never permitted herself to wound the morbid sensitiveness of those to whom fortune had been less kind. So, secretly wondering if the little man really stood there, or if anything so insignificant mattered, she went forward smiling and offered him her hand.

“So good of you to come and have a cup of tea with me.” She rang a bell and ordered tea of her Chinaman. “But why did you dress up? I am accustomed to overalls and flannel shirts, and quite like the idea of living in a mining camp.”

Whalen sat on the edge of his chair and stared into the fire, twirling his hat in his hands. “I guess I’ve got to be a gentleman again,” he said with a short laugh. “There’s nothing else left for me to be.”

“Oh! I hope——”

“My find—and I paid a thousand dollars for the claim—was nothing but a gash vein. Nothing in that but low grade carbonates.”

“But are you so sure? Often veins appears to pinch out a hundred feet or more above a really rich lode.”

“I’ve poured into that hole all my savings; all I had saved from my salary during four years, and every cent of my reward in the field of letters. I even—and against my secret resolutions—consumed a legacy left me by an uncle.”

“Perhaps if you would ask Mr. Compton to look at your claim—he is a sort of ore wizard——”

“I’ll ask no favours of Gregory Compton!” Whalen burst out, violently. “Were it not for him I never would have been enticed into this foolish venture. I cannot realise it—I, who was brought up in the most conservative corner of this conservative country—I, a pedagogue, a man of letters, that I should have so far descended as to become a prospector—live in a hut, cook my own bacon, dig with a pick——” He paused choking.

“Doubtless you remembered that some of the greatest millionaires in the country began that way. Or possibly the Northwest kindled your sense of adventure—that is inherent in every real man. But why blame Mr. Compton?”

Whalen had recovered his breath. He spat out his words. “Why should a man like that have all the luck? And such colossal luck! Who is he? What is he? In what way does he compare with me—a man of no family, of no culture, of no intellect——”

“Mr. Compton has given evidence that he has one of the best brains this country has produced.” Ora spoke evenly but with a glint in her eye.

“Oh, yes, brains! I make a fine distinction between mere brains and intellect. He has the sort of mental composition those men always seem to have in order that they may make use of their luck and roll up millions. But intellect? Not a cell. He has never read anything. I journeyed with him from Pony to Butte not long since and endeavoured to engage him in conversation. I might as well have tried to talk to a mummy—and an ill-mannered one at that. The moment I left the subject of mines he merely looked out of the window.”

Ora laughed merrily, and poured out the tea the Chinaman had brought in. “Perhaps it is just that lack of overdevelopment that we call intellect which permits these men to concentrate upon their genius for making money.”

“But that has nothing to do with their luck in the beginning. Luck! Blind luck! Fool’s luck! And why not to me? Why to this Gregory Compton? I never believed in luck before, but since this rush, and my own personal experience——” He swallowed a mouthful of tea too hastily, scalded himself, and, while he was gasping, Ora said soothingly:

“You cannot help believing in luck if you study the early history of any mining state. There are hundreds of stories of prospectors—you have told of many yourself; the majority had little or no education, less science. Out of a hundred evenly equipped with grit, common sense, some practical knowledge of ores, perhaps two would find a rich pocket or placer. Four or five possibly made a strike that would insure them a competence if they neither gambled nor drank. The rest nothing—not after forty years of prospecting in these mountains. I fancy there is something in that old phrase about the lucky star; in astronomical parlance the position of the planets at the moment of one’s birth.”

“But why not I?” wailed the professor. “Why—why this—well, he is a friend of yours—Gregory Compton?”

“Why not?”

“I am infinitely his superior in every way!” cried Whalen in perfect good faith. “It is I who should have discovered those millions and taken them to Beacon Street, not this obscure young Westerner, son of an illiterate old ranchman——”

“But you didn’t,” said Ora, patiently. “Besides, the fates are not unjust. They made you a member of the New England aristocracy, and gave you intellect. Do not be unreasonable and demand the mere prospector’s luck as well.”

Whalen looked at her suspiciously, but her eyes were teasing, not satiric. He had admired her always more than any woman he had met in the West, and had come to her blindly to be consoled. Suddenly he saw an indefinable change steal over her face, although her mouth remained curled with the stereotyped smile she kept for the Whalens. It was as if something deep in her brilliant eyes came to life, and her slight bust rose under the stiff shirtwaist. Whalen’s ears were not acute and he did not hear the light footstep that preceded a peremptory knock. Ora crossed the room swiftly and opened the door. Whalen was no fool, and he had written fiction for four years. He had guessed at once that his beautiful hostess loved the man who demanded admittance, and when he heard Gregory Compton’s voice he almost whistled. But he merely arose and frowned.

“Knocked off and thought I would run in early,” Gregory was beginning, when he saw Whalen. “How are you?” he asked with more cordiality than he usually wasted upon the little man. His spirits always flew to his head when he met Ora, stolid as he might look. “How’s your mine getting on?” he added, as he selected the longest of the chairs before the fire. “Heard it had petered out.”

“It has!”

“I’ll go over and have a look at it tomorrow if you like. I fancy you’re located too close to one of the faults. The trouble with you amateur prospectors—or buyers of prospectors’ claims—is that you don’t take a geologist out with you. You lose your heads over an assay report on exceptional specimens. But I’d like to see for myself.”

“It’s no use,” said Whalen gloomily. “I have used up all my money in that——” He had learned to swear in mining camp society, but he pulled himself up hastily, “that hole.”

“If I think there is anything there I’ll grub-stake you. Nobody would buy your claim, but somebody might jump it if you let it lapse, and I want to know who my neighbours are. Have you patented it?”

“Not yet.”

“Spent five hundred dollars on it?”

“Have I!”

“Well, I’ll look at it tomorrow, and if I think it’s good for anything I’ll help you out. I am going to Helena in a day or two. Come along and apply for your patent.”

“You are very kind.” Whalen felt repentant, and more grateful than he had ever condescended to feel before. “I’ll expect you tomorrow.” He inferred that he could best show his gratitude by taking himself off, and rose. “Good afternoon, Mrs. Blake. This hour has been refreshing and inspiring after my long absence from civilisation.”

“You must come soon again,” said Ora sweetly, as she marshalled him out. “The best of luck.”

She went to her bedroom for a few moments, and when she returned wore a soft tea gown made of several shades of woodland greens. She seated herself in her favourite chair, straight, with a high carved back, and took up her neglected embroidery. “Dinner will not be ready for half an hour,” she said. “How long that little man did stay. I am glad you made a friend of him, for I have always imagined that he could be venomous, and before you came in he was by way of hating you. Now tell me the surprise you have for the geologists and newspaper men on the second level.”

And for the next three hours they talked of ores.

XVIII

“GIVE me your hand, Gregory. I am no coward, but this is the first time I have ever been underground. My father would never permit it, nor my mother after him.”

Gregory extended his long arm behind him and Ida’s warm firm fingers clung to his hand. They had just left the skip at the second level of his mine. The geologists and the newspaper men, together with herself, Lord John, Gregory, and Mann, had entered the mine by way of the Primo shaft, inspected the insignificant vein of copper which had merely been blocked out, awaiting the possible erection of a concentrating plant—for it was not worth the expense of freight to Anaconda—thence down the ladder from the hole blasted by Apex, and into the drift where the magnificent vein of Perch of the Devil also merely had been blocked out; but for a more subtle reason. The case in Gregory’s favour was so flagrant that the great men had laughed, although gracefully submitting to interviews on the spot and expressing themselves with as few technicalities as possible. That the Primo copper upon which Apex had also sunk was a mere attenuated fork of the great vein which indisputably had faulted from the original vein in Gregory Compton’s property the reporters could see for themselves. Under the Apex law Gregory was within his lateral rights in sinking under the adjoining claim and thence under the Primo mine; and as far beyond as the vein persisted.

Against a man less determined and resourceful than Gregory Compton a wealthy corporation could obtain any verdict it demanded; but to persist in a suit for Apex rights after this public exposition would make any trust the laughing-stock of a continent. Even to persist in the claim that he was mining under an agricultural patent, and therefore outside his rights, would be mere petty persecution; and inevitably both suits would steal noiselessly to limbo. Amalgamated knew when it was beaten and would take its medicine with a grimace and watch for its next opportunity.

Ida, although she disliked the sensation of being underground, the chill of the tunnels and the drip of candle-grease on her smart linen skirt, had been deeply impressed by the scene in the excavation on the Perch vein: the men with their keen upturned faces, their peering eyes so close to the moving candles, the little yellow flames travelling along the beautiful yellow metal, the eager nervous hands of the newspaper men, the intense blackness beyond the radius of the candles. But her eyes returned constantly to her husband’s face. His eyes gleamed with copper fires. His profile against the dark background of the cavern looked as if carved in the rock by some prehistoric race.

The blood scorched her face and her heart leapt with pride as she heard these distinguished men defer to him, express their admiration without reserve. A year ago he had been as little known as when she married him. Today his extraordinary abilities were recognised by the entire country, and tomorrow he would be one of its colossi.

She was the only woman that had gone down. Mrs. Cameron and Mrs. Collier had preferred to remain comfortably with Ora in the bungalow, or to help her spread the tables under the pines, where luncheon was to be served. Therefore was she privileged to keep close to the host, and when they descended into the blackness of the second level she embraced further her feminine prerogatives. Mann had gone down first, the guests had followed, and Gregory, after a vain protest, had taken her down in the skip when it returned for himself.

The rest of the party had pushed forward, for they had been promised a surprise. Ida would have lingered, but Gregory pulled her on. He wanted to hear the comments. The racket of the drills had stopped. Ida saw the last of the guests disappear up a short ladder.

“Am I to go up into a stope?” she asked.

“If you want to see what we’ve come for.” He ran up the ladder, and she followed, insinuated herself into the hole and stood upright in the large excavation on the vein.

“Is it gold?” she gasped.

“No, but it’s a streak—a shoot—of chalcopyrite ten feet wide and of the highest value. And it may go down eight or nine hundred feet before it loses its richness and degenerates into a lower grade of ore. But there may be millions of tons of that. This is one of the few great shoots of chalcopyrite known.”

“Gregory!” said Ida ecstatically, “do you remember I always had such faith in you that I urged you so often to prospect on the ranch that you got quite cross?”

“Yes, I remember.”

“Never say I doubted you. I may be enchanted at all this success and recognition of your abilities, but I have never had the least sensation of surprise.”

Gregory smiled down into the eager beautiful face so close to his shoulder. She had manipulated him down the ladder into the tunnel and for the moment they were alone. “I hope you are half as proud of me as I am of you,” he said gallantly, although he was a trifle uneasy; not because she looked as if she might kiss him there in the semi-dark, but because he felt an impulse to kiss her. For the moment he regretted the wild romance upon which he was embarked, the torments of its present, the tragic possibilities of its future. Ida now would make an ideal wife, demanding far less of his jealously guarded inner self, to say nothing of his time, than Ora, who had that most terrible of all gifts, a passionate soul. But this disloyalty was brief, and he frowned and disengaged his hand, although he was far from suspecting that Ida had yielded to the temptation to pay him deliberate court.

“I shall be able to give you a string of pearls before long,” he said lightly, “or a million or two to play with. I want to hear what these men have to say. Suppose you go back with Lord John, and tell them that we are coming up soon for lunch. Ring the bell in the station twice for the skip and three times for hoist.”

Ida shrank back against the wall as if she had been struck, but when Lord John, who had made several futile attempts to separate her from her husband, came eagerly forward, she left Gregory to the chorus of enthusiasm and congratulation, and obeyed his directions.

XIX

IDA was in such high spirits during the luncheon that she managed to be brilliant and amusing within the limits of her expurgated vocabulary. Only Ora, who knew her so well, saw the sombre fire in the depths of her eyes, the sudden twist of her mouth at the corners, noted that her cheeks were crimson instead of their usual delicate coral, the occasional clenching of her hands. But she had little time to speculate upon the cause, for the large party were her guests, and, like any other Rocky Mountain hostess in the liquid month of June, she feared the sudden drenching of her tables.

But the day remained fine, and the geologists, who ever since their arrival in Butte had evinced a remarkable indifference to geology as a topic for conversation, were as lively as the newspaper men, and deeply appreciative of the good looks and animated conversation of the four women who ate almost nothing in their efforts at mental subdivision. Ora had invited also her engineer and Professor Whalen, placing the latter as far from Ida as possible; but she saw that he was covertly watching the woman he must hate. Ida had thrown him a careless nod when they met by the tables in the grove; and he had returned it with a bow of surpassing dignity.

Gregory, now that the men of science and of the press had served his purpose, was eager to be rid of them, and excused himself when the luncheon was half over, on the plea that he was his own manager and needed at the mine. He disappeared into the Primo shaft house, as he often took that short cut to his own shaft, and Mowbray, who had been silent, for Gregory affected his buoyant spirits unaccountably, moved his chair up beside Ida and endeavoured to divert her mind from the general to the specific. But she snubbed him and he relapsed into gloom. On the train, however, when she saw that Whalen, who was on his way to Helena to apply for his patent, was watching her, she flirted pointedly with the handsome Englishman.

The guests were to leave Butte on the seven o’clock train, which, fortunately for the strain that all were beginning to feel, was only half an hour late. When it had pulled out and Ida had waved her last farewell, she walked in silence to her car, and intimated with a curt nod that Mowbray might take the seat beside her. “But tell Ben where you want to go,” she said, “for I can’t ask you to dine with me tonight.”

Mowbray told the chauffeur to drop him at the Club and then asked his lady, whose animation had dropped to zero, if anything had happened to annoy her, or if she were merely worn out.

“Don’t ask me any questions,” said Ida sharply. “I’m sorry to seem inhospitable but I’ve got something to think out. You can go to the dance at the Country Club.”

“I shall more likely go to my rooms and write letters. Don’t worry about me. Shall we have a ride tomorrow morning?”

“I don’t know.”

Mowbray was always philosophical about women, having been brought up with many sisters. “You are tired out,” he said without too much sympathy. “Just call me up if you feel like doing anything in the morning.”

“All right. Good night.”

She left him at the Silver Bow Club. Her own house was only a few blocks distant. She told the maid who admitted her that she wanted no dinner and should go to bed at once and without assistance. When she reached the seclusion of her bedroom she locked the door, flung her hat on the floor and stamped on it, broke several valuable objects, and then paced up and down, gritting her teeth to keep from screaming.

There was but one person on earth that she hated more than she hated Gregory Compton and that was herself. She had meant to play a waiting game of many interviews, in which her fine calculation had mapped out the insidious approach, the adroit pushing aside of barrier after barrier, until Gregory returned almost inadvertently to his allegiance. She had no desire for romantic scenes; they would have embarrassed herself, and with her instinctive knowledge of man, she knew that Gregory would shrink back from any situation that might involve explanations. Nor did she wish to let a man so absorbed as Gregory feel that he was loved too much, lest he chafe at the thought of feminine exactions, and his mind continue to dwell upon the delights of freedom. He might be capable of moments when the woman alone existed, but there would be long intervals when he would hate a woman’s clinging arms if they made him ten minutes late for his work, particularly if he was headed for his beloved mine. Ida, shrewd, self-controlled, watchful, knew herself, now that her powers were developed, to be the natural mate for such a man. He would drive a temperamental woman mad.

And she had seemed to make a steady progress. The geologists had remained for three days in Butte before visiting Perch of the Devil. On the second evening they had been entertained by the professors of the School of Mines, but on the other two evenings she had given them elaborate dinners, and Gregory had attended each. She had seen that he was increasingly proud of her, and grateful. Upon both occasions they not only had had a little talk apart but he had drifted back to her more than once.

And today she had spoiled everything! In the darkness of that mine she had weakened and made open love to him. She had practically offered herself—she ground her teeth as she thought of her clinging fingers, her appealing eyes, her cheek almost brushing his—and he had rejected her—with consideration, but finality!

If he had knocked her down she would have cherished hope. But in this hour she had none. His indifference was colossal. The busiest men in America had their women; she no longer could comfort herself with the delusion that the mine was a controlling and exclusive passion; she merely had ceased completely to attract him—and she remembered how thorough he was; she no more could relight those old fires than she could blow life into the dead ashes of Big Butte. He would turn to another woman one of these days; it was not within human possibility that he would go through life without love; but not to her! not to her! She would do to entertain his friends, to flaunt his wealth and advertise his success; in time no doubt he would treat her as a confidential friend; but sexually she was an old story. It was apparent that the mere thought bored him; it was only when Gregory was bored that he was really polite.

If she could but have accepted this, resigned all hope, instead of subjecting herself to humiliation; she, who had never failed to send the blood to a man’s head with a glance! She didn’t want to hate him. She didn’t want to hate herself. Why could she not have been content to accept the inevitable with philosophy and grace?

The answer that, owing to some mysterious law of her being, she loved him, made her want to smash everything else in the room; but she would have some difficulty concealing the present wreckage from her servants, so she bit her handkerchief to shreds instead.

When the furies had tired her body she fell into a chair and although her brain was still hot with the blood sent there by excitement and lack of food, she admitted frankly that the peculiar nature of her agitation was due to wounded pride and intense mortification; had she arrived at a point where she no longer could hope, but without self-betrayal, she might have wept bitter tears, but there still would have been a secret sweetness in loving him. Now, she growled out her hatred. She longed to do something to hurt him. If she only were another sort of woman! She would go to Mowbray’s rooms, go to Helena with him for a week. And simultaneously she yearned to be consoled, not only in her heart but in her wounded pride.

Should she ask her husband for a divorce; revenge herself by becoming an English duchess? Ora, in the moment or two they had found together at the station, had told her that Mowbray’s older brother was at Davos, unmistakably dying of tuberculosis, and that his engagement, insisted upon by his father, had been broken. Valdobia had given her this news in his last letter, adding the hope that his friend would bring Ida back with him that they might all be together once more.

Was this the solution of her problem? A marriage that would demonstrate to Gregory Compton that her moment of seeming weakness was mere coquetry; a marriage that would raise her an immeasurable social distance above him; a permanent dissociation from everything that could remind her of him and this terrible obsession that had disorganised her being, reduced her to the grovelling level of the women whose dependence on the favour of man she had always despised?

When she reflected that her revenge would fall flat, Gregory’s not being the order of mind to appreciate the social pre-eminence of a titled race, she ground her teeth, again. There was nothing left but to consider herself. Should she choose the part that not only would exalt her station and fill her life with the multifarious interests of a British peeress, but banish this man in time from her memory; or stay on and alternate torments with moments of indescribable sweetness when he smiled upon her? And might she not yet manipulate him into her net if she continued to play the waiting game? Or would she go wholly to pieces the first time they were alone together?

Her pride strangled at this possibility and brought her to her feet. The blood was still boiling in her head, she knew what nerves were for the first time in her life. She made up her mind to go out and walk. In this part of the town she was not likely to meet anyone.

She found another hat, put on a warm coat, and let herself out of the house. It was ten o’clock. All the West Side, no doubt, was at the Country Club.

For a time she walked rapidly and aimlessly, trying to focus her mind on other things. But when a woman is in love and the path is stony, she is obsessed much as people are that suffer from shock and reiterate ceaselessly the circumstances of its cause. Her brain seethed with hate, longed for revenge. Nothing would have gratified her more than to take the secret revenge of infidelity. Many a woman has taken a lover for the satisfaction of laughing to herself at her husband’s dishonour; to dishonour being the most satisfactory of all vengeance, whether open or concealed.

She realised abruptly that her thoughts had led her unconsciously to the door of John Mowbray’s lodgings. The flat had been lent him by a banker to whom he had brought a letter from his brother, and who had gone East immediately after his arrival; the banker’s wife lived in Southern California. It occupied the second story of a house in West Broadway and had its own entrance on a side street. Mowbray had given a tea there a day or two before, and Ida had presided.

She did not delude herself for a moment that she could take her full revenge upon the unconscious Gregory, but at least she could do something quite shocking, something that would infuriate a husband. Ida was not afraid of any man, least of all one that wished to make a duchess of her, but it would be an additional satisfaction to torment him, and an adventure with a spice of danger in it no doubt would restore her equilibrium. If Mowbray made violent love to her she felt, by some obscure process of feminine logic, that she would forgive Gregory Compton.

She glanced hastily up and down the street, then more sharply, wondering if she had dreamed that once or twice she had looked over her shoulder with the sense of being followed. It was a bright moonlight night. No one was in sight. She rang the bell of Mowbray’s flat. The door was opened from above. At the head of the stairs stood the Jap who served as housekeeper and valet.

She hesitated a moment, taken aback. She had forgotten the servant. Then she closed the door behind her. “Is Lord John in?” she asked negligently.

The Jap spread out his hands deprecatingly. “His lordship not at home,” he announced.

Ida hesitated another moment, then ascended the stair and entered the living-room. “Turn on the lights,” she said, “I shall wait for him.”

The Jap obeyed orders, bowed, and withdrew. For a moment Ida was tempted to telephone to the Silver Bow Club, but Mowbray was sure to return soon to write his letters, and she liked the idea of giving him a surprise. She lit a cigarette, selected a novel from the bookcase, and sank into the most comfortable of the chairs. The room was warm; both body and brain were very weary. The cool night air had driven the blood from her head. She yawned, dropped the book, fell sound asleep.

She awoke as the clock was striking half-past one. She was still alone. For a moment she stared about her, bewildered, then rose and laughed aloud.

“This is about the flattest——” She went swiftly out into the hall and awoke the slumbering Jap. “You little yellow devil,” she cried, “why didn’t you tell me that his lordship had gone to the party at the Country Club?”

Once more the Jap was deprecating. “Madam did not ask.”

Ida produced a gold piece. “Well, you are not to tell him that I came, nor anyone else. If you do I’ll wring your neck.”

The Jap’s eyes, fixed upon the gold, glistened. “Why should I tell?” he asked philosophically; and having pocketed the coin ran downstairs and bowed the lady out.

When Ida was about to turn the corner she whirled about, this time with a definite sensation of being followed. But the street was empty save for a man slouching down the hill with an unsteady gait, his head nodding toward his chest. It was a familiar sight in any mining town; nevertheless she quickened her steps, and in a moment was safe within her own house.

XX

ON the morning following the departure of the geologists Gregory took the bit between his teeth and went in to Butte to see his wife. In his first moment of shock and confusion it had seemed to him best that Ora, whose subtlety he recognised, was the one to manipulate Ida’s still too formalistic mind toward the divorce court; but he was unaccustomed to relegate any part of his affairs to others, least of all to a woman. Nor did he think it necessary to inform Ora of his sudden decision. He might work almost double shift to keep her out of his thoughts and diminish temptation, and he might marry her and continue to love her passionately; but she would obtain little ascendency over him. He knew what he wanted; he had trained his will until at times it appeared formidable even to himself, and he was as nearly the complete male that regards woman, however wonderful, as the supplementary female as still survives.

He had few illusions about himself, and it had crossed his mind more than once, since the hope of divorce had dazzled both of them, that for a year or two or least there must be a certain amount of friction between a nature like his and a complex, super-civilised, overgrown feminine ego like Ora Blake. While he had sat with his legs stretched out to the fire and his eyes half closed, his body weary, but mentally alert, he had received certain definite impressions of an independent almost anarchical mind, contemptuous of the world and its midges save as they might be of use to herself; of a mind too well-bred ever to be managing and exacting in any vulgar sense, but inexorable in its desires and as unscrupulous in their pursuit as her father had been; of a superlative refinement coupled with a power of intense and reckless passion found only in women possessing that quality of imagination that exalts and idealises the common mortal attributes. Moreover, it was a mind that, the first joy of submission and surrender diminished, would think for itself.

Until that night when both had dropped the mask for a moment he had never thought of her as a complicated ego, merely as one from whom he felt temporarily separated after a union of centuries; and it had been the reluctant admission that he knew her very little, save as a gracious woman and his own companion, that had enabled him to school himself to spend long hours with her alone as before. He had tumbled blindly into matrimony once, and no matter how much he might love this woman, to whom he had seemed from the first to be united by a secret and ancient bond, he was determined none the less to marry the second time with his eyes wide open.

But although his glimpses of Ora’s winding depths gave him moments of uneasiness he always fell back upon the complacent reflection that he was a man, a man, moreover, with a cast-iron will, and that the woman did not live who would not have to adapt herself to him did he take her to wife.

Until the day before the party at the mines he had been content to drift, but a certain moment down in his own mine had given a new and abrupt turn to both thoughts and purpose. Ida might have spared herself her agonies of shame: she had not betrayed her love, but she had given him a distinct impression that she was employing her redoubtable feminine weapons to reduce him to his old allegiance. He had remembered for a poignant moment that he once had loved this woman to distraction, and during that moment he saw her again as the most beautiful and distracting of her sex. His brief surrender had filled him with fury. He had no intention of despising himself. From boyhood up he had had nothing but contempt for the man that did not know his own mind. If it had not been for this serene confidence in himself, he, who was constitutionally wary in spite of the secret and wistful springs of romance in his nature and the apparent suddenness of his bold plunges, never would have married Ida Hook, nor any woman, until he had sounded her thoroughly. But he had behaved like any hot-headed and conceited young fool, and, much as he now admired Ida, it both infuriated him and appalled him to feel even for a moment toward her as he had in his raw inexperienced youth.

He therefore made up his mind to go to her like a rational being and ask her to give him his freedom. They had made a mistake. They were reasonable members of an advanced civilisation, where mistakes were recognised and rectified whenever possible. He did not doubt for a moment that reason and logic must appeal as forcibly to a woman as to himself.

The door of his wife’s house was opened after the usual delay, and the maid told him that Mrs. Compton was upstairs in the billiard room “or somewheres.” He took the stairs three steps at a time lest his courage evaporate; but drew a long breath of relief when he entered the large square hall and saw nothing of Ida. He would have rung for the maid, but reflected that no doubt he had already provided enough gossip for the republic below stairs without admitting that he did not know his way round his wife’s house. He was about to knock on each door in turn when he noticed that one in a corner at the end of the hall was open and that it led into a narrow passageway. Beyond there was light, possibly in one of those boudoirs of which he had heard. Mrs. Murphy would have been sure to have a boudoir, and no doubt Ida, little disposed as she was to indolence, spent some part of her mornings in it.

He adventured down the passageway that terminated in a large room full of sunlight. He saw his wife standing in the middle of this room looking about her with a curious expression of wistfulness. The little hall was carpeted, but she heard him almost as soon as he saw her; she would have known those light swift footsteps in a marching army. He was inside the room before she could reach the doorway and close it behind her and astonished to see a deep blush suffuse her face. His quick darting glance took in his surroundings as he shook hands with her. The room was a nursery.

“I had two beds put in here and have just seen that they were taken out,” stammered Ida.

Her embarrassment was communicable, but he said gruffly as he walked to the window, “Didn’t know the Murphys had children.”

“Oh, yes, they had two little ones. Seven in all. I think it odd they should have left the toys here even if they are rich enough to buy toys every day. There is something sacred about a child’s toys.”

Ida was merely talking against time, but she hardly could have said anything better calculated to arrest his attention.

He turned and looked at her in astonishment.

“Do you mean to intimate—that you wish you had children? You?”

Ida’s brain as well as her body was very weary, but it sprang to action at once. “Oh, yes,” she said intensely. “Oh, yes! And I might have had two! They would be wonderful in this house.”

“But——” He cast about desperately. “With two children you could not have gone to Europe.”

“That wouldn’t have mattered.”

“But—don’t you realise that it is this last year of unusual advantages that has developed you so—so—remarkably? You hated children——”

“And do you suppose it was Europe that made me want children?”

“Oh, of course, nothing is as simple as that. You were taken out of yourself, out of your narrow self-sufficient little life; all your fine latent powers were developed——”

“But not altogether by Europe! Still, I don’t deny that it woke me up, gave me not one new point of view but many, developed me, if you like that better. Would you like lunch earlier? You get up at such unearthly hours——”

“I’m not hungry. I want to talk to you. That is what I came for. Won’t you sit down—no, not here! Let us go where there are comfortable chairs. I—I am tired.”

“Very well. Let us go down to the library.” As she walked before him he noted that her superb body, which usually looked as if set with fine steel springs, was heavy and listless.

The masculine looking room below restored his balance.

“You don’t look as well as usual,” he remarked, as he threw himself into the deepest of the chairs. “Yesterday was a hard day, and you had had those men on your hands for——”

“I am tired,” said Ida briefly, “but it doesn’t matter. What do you want to talk to me about?”

He did not answer for a few moments, then he stood up and thrust his hands into his pockets and scowled at the carpet. Involuntarily Ida also rose to her feet and braced herself, crossing her arms over her breast.

“It is impossible for this to go on,” said Gregory rapidly. “It is unnatural. People don’t submit to broken lives in these days. I think you had better get a divorce and be happy. Mowbray seems to be a fine fellow. Of course no one doubts that he has followed you here. He could make you happy, and as soon as I am able—in a year or two—I shall give you a million; in time more.”

“Oh! Oh!”

“You surely cannot want to live for ever like—like—this!”

“I have no desire to marry again. Have you?” She shot the question at him, every nerve on edge with suspicion.

But the last thing in his mind was to betray Ora, and he answered promptly. “No. But I am absorbed in my mine, and my life will be more crowded every year with accumulating interests. You are a woman. You are young—and—and—you wish for children.”

Ida believed that after her revelation of yesterday he had come to let her down gently. She determined to throw her all on one heavy stake. If she lost, at least she would have had the satisfaction of telling him that she loved him; she had already sacrificed her pride, and there was a reckless sweetness in the thought of revealing herself absolutely to this man. When a woman loves a man not quite hopelessly she experiences almost as much satisfaction in listening to her own confession as to his.

She drew herself up, her arms still across her breast, and Gregory thought he had never seen a woman look so dignified and so noble.

“Listen, Gregory,” she said, with no tremor in her voice but deepening sadness in her eyes, “I regret that I have no children because they would be yours. I am willing to live and die alone because I have lost your love. I know how I lost it, but, as I look back over my crudity and ignorance, I do not see how I could have kept it. You were immeasurably above and beyond me. Nature, or some mental inheritance, gave you sensitiveness, refinement, distinction, to say nothing of brains. I had to achieve all that I am now. I was a raw conceited fool like thousands of American girls of any class, who think they are just a little too good for this world. I had ceased to love you in my inordinate love of myself, and the natural consequence was, that as I made no attempt to improve myself, I lost you as soon as my halo of novelty had disappeared. I took for granted, however, that I was returning from Europe to the old conditions. When I discovered that you had no such intention I was piqued, astonished, angry. But when I thought it all out I understood. You were within your rights, and you have behaved with decency and self-respect. I have nothing but unmitigated contempt for two people that continue to live together as a mere matter of habit and convenience. They are the real immoralists of the world, and the girls that ‘go wrong’ know it and laugh at the reformers. Of course I never had ceased to love you down deep, but it took just the course of conduct you pursued to make me known to myself. I realise that it is hopeless—too late. I never intended to betray myself, but I did so in an unguarded moment yesterday. Otherwise I never should have told you all this. I have realised since then that I have lost you irrevocably, but at least if I cannot be your wife I will be no man’s, and I shall continue to bear your name—and see you sometimes.”

Gregory, feeling as if he were being flayed, had dropped upon the edge of a chair and buried his face in his hands. When she finished he said hoarsely: “I never dreamed—I never imagined—I thought you incapable of real feeling——”

“I think I was then. And since—Well, you are only a man, after all, and I made you think what I chose until yesterday—Do you mean——” she added sharply, “that you did not guess—did not know yesterday?”

“It never occurred to me. I thought you merely were flirting a little——”

“Hi!” cried Ida. Then she got back into her rôle. “It doesn’t matter,” she said with sad triumph. “I am glad I have told you. As for the future? You have convinced Butte that we are the best of friends. Stay away if you wish unless I give an entertainment where your absence would cause too much comment. You don’t want to marry again, but you may feel yourself as free as air. And one day—when you are worn out, tired of the everlasting struggle in which you moneymakers work harder than the day labourer, with his eight-hour laws and freedom from the terrific responsibilities of money; when you begin to break and want a home, I will make one for you. There is the doorbell. Lord John is coming for lunch. I shall give him his dismissal—once for all.”

Gregory stood up and took her hand. He had a vague masculine sense of unfairness somewhere but he could not begin to define it, and he was as deeply impressed as discouraged. “You are a grand woman, Ida,” he said. “This is not an hour that any man forgets. I wish that you might be happy.”

“Nature never intended that people on this planet should be happy—only in spots, anyhow. And don’t worry about me. You have put me in the way of getting a great deal out of this old game we call life, and I am grateful to you. Good-bye.”

They shook hands and Gregory went out into the hall as the maid was admitting Lord John. This time the men made no pretence at politeness. They merely glared and passed.

XXI

THE Primo vein had been recovered some time since and Ora had traversed the fault drift twice and watched the drilling from the station; not only to assert her rights as mistress of the mine but to experience the sensations she had anticipated. She soon discovered that when a woman is in love, and the issue doubtful, other interests fail to provide sensations. But she went down into the mine every day and roamed through the older workings. She was tormented and restless, but by no means without hope; and this being the case she sometimes wondered why she continued to write to Valdobia as if nothing had occurred to interfere with their tacit engagement. It was her duty to tell him the truth, at once, but she switched off all other currents every Saturday morning and wrote her Roman long gay tantalising letters; being gifted as a scribe, like so many women, she made them notable with amusing and enlightening incidents of mining-camp life.

She had not seen Gregory since Monday evening. He had gone suddenly to Butte on the morning following the visit of the geologists, and had telephoned her that he should take the afternoon train to the Capital and no doubt be detained for several days. She had expected that he would telephone or telegraph from Helena; that he would write was too much to expect; she had never seen his handwriting. But he had not recognised her existence.

Four days after his departure she went down into her mine and walked as far as the ragged opening blasted by the Apex men, thinking of Ida. How much longer would it be before Mowbray overcame her prejudices, and her own independent and proud spirit revolted under her husband’s complete indifference? Few women were given such an opportunity for revenge both subtle and open as Mowbray was offering to Ida Compton.

It was at this point in her reflections that Ora heard a light footfall coming down the fault drift of Perch of the Devil. Without an instant’s hesitation she descended the short ladder that had been placed between the two drifts for the benefit of the geologists, and relit her candle. She met Gregory in the little station. He also held a candle, but he was so startled at the apparition that he dropped it. She thrust the point of her candlestick into a wooden post.

“I was going over to see you,” he said unsteadily as he picked up his candle, relighted it, and mechanically followed her example. He turned abruptly and walked half way up the drift and back, while she stood still, shivering with anxiety. Something had put his determined serenity out of joint. A crisis impended. She felt her unsteadiness and sat down suddenly on the edge of an ore car, fancying this dimly lighted room and the black passage leading to it looked as a death-house cell must look on the eve of execution.

Finally she stammered: “What is it? Please tell me?”

He leaned against the wall in front of her. “I am afraid it’s all up,” he said lifelessly. “I went in on Tuesday to ask Ida to obtain a divorce. She refused to listen. She has no wish to remarry and will have none of divorce. Nothing could have been more definite than our interview.”

“But—but surely in time—if we have patience——”

“There is no hope. Mowbray entered as I left. She intended to dismiss him at once.”

Ora, without reasoning, of which she was incapable at the moment, felt that he had been convinced by more than argument and mere words. She flung her arms over her lap and dropping her head upon them burst into a wild transport of tears and sobs; she was so unused to all expression of emotion that she neither knew nor cared how to control it, and the tears swept out the floodgates that had held her passion in check.

She looked up suddenly and saw Gregory standing over her with twitching face and clenched hands; and exulting in the complete abandonment of all the controls that civilisation has bred, she sprang to her feet, flung herself into his arms and her own arms about his neck. She had her immediate reward, for he nearly crushed her, and he kissed her until they both were breathless and reeling.

This was the passion she had read and dreamed of; for once the realities were commensurate; instinct warned her to postpone argument and prolong the moment to its utmost. There was room in her brain for the doubt if such a moment ever could come again, so little of love-making is wholly unpremeditated. So she clung to him and kissed him, and in that dim cavern his dark face, so reminiscent of those great prehistoric races that interested him, looked as he felt, primeval man that had found his mate.

But, whatever his ancient inheritance, he was the immediate product of a highly practical civilisation. His keen calculating brain sent a lightning flash across his passion. He lifted her off her feet and sat her down on the ore car. Then he took a candlestick in either hand.

“Come to the other station,” he said peremptorily, and led the way to a less dangerous seclusion.

He was half way up the fault drift before Ora, subdued but rebellious, stooped mechanically and found the veil that she wore in place of a hat when in the mines. She followed him slowly. She felt rather than reasoned that she had missed her opportunity and wished angrily that she had had lovers and knew better how to manage men. By the time she reached the shaft station the confusion in her mind had lifted somewhat and she had arrived at the conclusion that she could not overcome him in the same way again, but must use her brains. She sat down on the box and smoothed her hair with apparent unconcern.

Gregory had disposed of the two candlesticks and said, his voice still unsteady: “There isn’t much to say, but I want to have my last interview with you in my mine. I cannot get away from here for two or three days. Will you leave at once?”

“Will you listen to me? I have my right to be heard?”

“What is there to say?”

She clasped her hands in her lap and looked up at him. Gregory sighed and set his teeth. She looked surpassingly lovely and rather helpless—women, at their best, always seemed to him pathetic.

“Gregory,” she said, “you don’t doubt that I love you?”

“No. But what is the use? Do you suppose I am going to make you my mistress—all Montana would know it in less than no time. I’m no saint, but it wouldn’t work—not for us!”

“But you want me?”

“Oh!” He turned away, then swung round upon her. She had stood up. Her head was bent forward. “You should help me out!” he cried angrily. “Can’t you see—it’s you I’m thinking of. Do you suppose I want all the sporting women in Butte making horrible jokes about you—all your friends cutting you? What’s a man good for if he doesn’t protect a woman?”

“Love affairs have lasted for years without being found out.”

“Precious seldom. And we are not buried in a big city. I must live out here and you would either have to live out here too, or I should be sneaking into your house in Butte. A business-like intrigue! Remember I lived somewhat before I married. Sentiment and romance soon evaporate——”

“Oh, yes, that is always what I have thought when I have read the American novelists’ attempts to portray what they call a ‘guilty love’. The only word that expresses it delicately is liaison, and the setting should be foreign as well. There is no background here. We are still under the drab shadow of Puritanism. I have heard it estimated that twenty-five thousand American women go abroad every year to indulge in a fleeting liaison that gives them courage to endure the desperately material and commonplace life of this country for another year. You don’t understand that because you never have been in Europe. But Egypt—Italy—in Southern Europe anywhere—with its unbridled beauties of nature and its far more poetic beauties that centuries of art have given it—and a thousand years of love behind us—Oh, cannot you imagine how wonderful love would be? Do you think I should ever want to come back?”

Gregory was staring at her. “Do you mean,” he stammered, “that you would sacrifice your reputation openly—your future—do you care enough for that?”

“I mean I love you so exclusively that I wish I had a thousand times more to sacrifice.”

“But—but—there are always Americans travelling—and you know many Europeans——”

“They are always easy to avoid. There are villas with walls, and pink flowers on top of the walls. And we could travel and see the wonders of art when the tourist season was over. Nor would I monopolise you. You could have the society of men of brains and achievement everywhere.”

He continued to stare at her radiant wistful face. He had known that she loved him, but it had never occurred to him that she would be willing to give up the world for his sake. She was a proud woman, an aristocrat, she had an exceptional position everywhere; the great world when they parted stood ready to offer its consolations.

She had unrolled a heavenly vision! His mind had revolted from debasing her to the status of what is euphemistically known in the West as “sporting women”; he also remembered the immediate disillusionments of his younger manhood and wondered if the hideousness of Butte had been responsible. The Mediterranean with its ancient civilisations flourishing and forgotten before the historic period, Egypt, full-grown offspring of a still more ancient but vanished civilisation—both called to that archæological instinct so closely allied to the geological, made him fancy he heard faint ancestral voices. Ora’s eyes were holding his, and her gaze was as powerful as his own. For the moment he no longer was a son of the newest section of the newest world. The turquoise waters of the Mediterranean spread before him, but he saw it alive with galleys——

He jerked his eyes away, folded his arms and stared downward. He must think rationally, not with vapours in his brain. It might be that he would be more than fool to sacrifice to any consideration the one chance for happiness in perfect union that life would offer him.

Suddenly he became aware that he was staring at the rocky floor of his mine, of its first level; the flickering candle flames revealed bits of bright yellow metal. And below was the second level with its superb shoot of copper ore ten feet wide. And below, on the third level, still was the vein far more beautiful than virgin gold. And down—down—in those vast unlocked caverns—what mysteries—what wonder-ores might not the earth harbour for him alone to find and name——

“What are you thinking of?” cried Ora sharply. Then she threw out her arms wildly. “I know! I know! It is those accursed ores! Oh, God! What have I in me, I, a mere woman, to compensate for the loss of a mine? I was a fool—Of course! Of course!”

But Gregory, although his blood had frozen in his veins at the horrid vision of a permanent divorce from his mine, would make no such admission.

“Ora,” he said quietly, “it would be very wonderful—for about three months. You would despise me if I were content to dawdle away my life in an olive grove, or throw away my best years and these great energies nature has given me, doing nothing in that old civilisation in which I could find no place. And in time you would resent the weakness that had stranded you with no recourse in life but myself. That sort of thing has never been a success and never will be, because nature did not make man to live on love alone, and it is much the same with the intellectual woman. It wouldn’t work. Not with us. I have known from the beginning that it must be marriage or nothing. And Ida would not divorce me if I ran away with you. She would be entitled to her revenge and she would take it.” He leaned forward and signalled the station call. “Please take the skip when it comes. I am going below.” And he ran down the ladder.

XXII

ORA got into the skip and was whisked to the surface.

She drew the veil over her head and face, wishing dimly that she had gone home through the mines; but a moment later the veil fell to her shoulders unnoticed. As she crossed the Apex claim she was vaguely aware that someone, almost in her path, lifted his hat. She bowed automatically, feeling like those poor wound-up royalties who must smile graciously upon their loyal people even though a cancer devour the body or the brain reel with sorrow.

Whalen, abnormal in vanity and conceit though he was, took no offence; not only was this in his estimation the one great lady of the Western annex, but he was startled by the expression in her fixed eyes of anguish, terror, and surprise. He had seen Gregory Compton go down into his mine not a half an hour ago, and it was easy for his fictionised if unimaginative mind to conjure up a hazy picture of the scene underground. He turned very red, partly from gratification at being so close to human passion and pain, but more from the knowledge that he shortly could offer all the elements for another and a still more dramatic crisis. At the same time he could do the one woman he admired in this wilderness a good turn and heal his cankerous ache for vengeance.

Ora went on to her little house and sank into a chair before the burnt-out logs. Her body felt as if it were a vessel into which had been poured all the waters of woman’s bitterness and despair. Nevertheless, her predominant sensation was astonishment. For a year she had lived in a fool’s paradise, indissolubly mated with Gregory Compton. It was only in the moment when the idea of his own divorce flashed into her mind that she realised she had meant to have him for ever, that her imagination had been a mere playground on which she had romped, and abruptly abandoned when she saw reality standing at the gate.

Since that day, interrupted only by the fevers and doubts of love, she had accepted with joy her predestined fate as the visible mate of Gregory Compton. Else what did it all mean? She had counted on marriage, but that respectable solution had faded into utter insignificance as soon as the shock of Ida’s refusal had passed. To fling the world aside, to regard it as a mere whirling speck in the void, followed as a matter of course. She and this man would fill all space.

And she had lost. It was over. Over. Over. For a time the astonishment consequent upon the mental reiteration of this fact held her. Her mind, quick, alert, sinuous as she had always found it, was unable to readjust itself. How could anything be over that manifestly had been created to go on for ever? What, then, did it all mean: that mutual recognition when they had sat together that night in Butte, that long mental obsession, this later perfect understanding, this indubitable power to find in each other complete happiness? Over. And by the man’s decree. How odd. How odd. And what a tragic waste.

She knew that the mine had pulled him, but she was too much the woman to take a mine seriously. There had been some other reason. He loved her; she never doubted that. He had resisted—why? She groped back through her limited experience, wondering if the trouble were that she had had so little. Life had not begun with her until a year ago. She had been a mere student, deliberately living in the unreal, often deluding, world of books, the worst of all preparations for life.

Some women were independent of experience, knew men by instinct. She felt that Ida, in a similar situation, would have had her way. She had not managed cleverly; no doubt with all her charm and her natural allurement for men, even a certain acquired coquetry, she was one of those women that could theorise brilliantly, but failed utterly to manage their own affairs at critical moments.

She was well aware that she had not been developing along ideal lines of late, particularly since she had come out here with the unadmitted intention of stealing her friend’s husband. By all the laws of tradition she should be wicked all through. Pride, diffidence, fastidiousness—one or all, she was in no condition to decide—had prevented her from playing the deliberate rôle of siren. She sighed and wished that life could be played upon the formula adopted by so many brilliant novelists: a steady unrelenting development of character upon strictly logical lines and by means of cunningly created situations, that was as much like life as a mother’s formula would be for the thoughts and deeds of her children at a given hour a year hence.

Ora did not know that most people in their rare moments of honest introspection find themselves singularly imperfect. She had looked for greater consistency in her complex recesses; assuming that if she made up her mind to take the husband of any woman, and that woman her best friend, she would be wholly hard and wicked, and, for the sake of the result, quite willing to achieve this consistent imperfection. And such hardness would be the surest of all solaces in the event of failure. She felt neither hard nor nearly as wicked as she should, but she did recognise the fact that if she had one more chance she would win by hook or crook.

Her thoughts swung to Ida. What had she said to Gregory in that last decisive interview? Ida was as clever as the devil. She would watch her chance and make just the right appeal at the right moment. Gregory could be ruthless to the woman of whom he had wearied or to the woman he loved, but if his wife played upon his honour, his Western chivalry, his sense of fair play, and reiterated her own rights—to her would he lower his flag if it struck the life out of his own heart, and left himself nothing to feed the deep passion and romance of his nature for the rest of his life.

In any case Ida had won.

Once more Ora wished that she had gone to work when she found herself penniless after her father’s death. She would have developed normally, and it was unthinkable that in the little world of Butte she would not have met Gregory Compton while he was free. Then not only would she be happy today but know nothing of those abysmal depths in her soul which she execrated while yielding to them and lamenting that for the time being they were no worse. Love may be divine when all goes well, or one is born into the cult of the martyr, but when it comes too late to passionate natures associated with virile and accomplished minds, it can be the very spawn of hell. Ora’s regret that she was not of the breed of those finished wantons of history that rose to fame on the shattered hearts of men was born of expediency. Could she have been given her choice and Gregory Compton she would have elected to be fine and noble, consummating the lofty dictates of her superior intellectual endowment. Not yet had she realised that lacking a ruthless centralised ideal, rarely allied to brilliant intellects, the souls of women even more than those of men (who have less time and more poise) are the playthings of Circumstance.

She became aware that her Chinaman was crossing the room, and before she could refocus her wandering mental vision and intercept him, he had opened the front door and admitted Professor Whalen.

XXIII

IDA had broken a dinner engagement and sat alone in her library. She knew that Gregory had passed through Butte that day on his way from Helena to Pony; she had seen him leave the Block where his lawyers had their offices and jump into a waiting taxi. He was not the man to take a cab for anything but an imminent train. She had rushed home, but he had neither called nor telephoned. She reasoned that he would be more than man if he were not reluctant to see her again after their last embarrassing interview, that there was no cause for fresh doubts, and that there was literally nothing for her to do at present but continue to play her waiting game. But she felt both sad and nervous, and wondered if it were in her to despair, to “cut and run” like other women; or whether it might not be wise to absent herself for a time. Gregory was the sort of man to appreciate delicacy, and after an absence of two months they would meet quite naturally. She could visit Yellowstone and Glacier Park, and send him pleasant impersonal postcards.

But although she hesitated to acknowledge it, she was tired of her waiting game, she wished that “fate would get a move on”, and she had left her husband once with unforeseen results. She leaned her elbows on her knees and pressed her hands against her face. She had always cherished a high opinion of her cleverness in regard to men, but she was nonplussed. For a woman of her resource there should be some alternative to waiting. She knew that she had made a deep impression on her husband in that momentous interview, but who could say that he had not deliberately put the memory of it out of his mind? Certainly there was no sign that it had softened him or paved the way for her reinstatement into his life.

She was alarmed at her waning self-control. During these last few days she barely had been able to play her part in society; the people at the various functions she had attended had seemed to her confused and absent mind like marionettes that she could sweep off the stage with her arm, and she had retreated into her shell lest she insult them irreparably.

She brought her heavy brows together. Could there be another woman after all? Gregory was cleverer than any detective. Why should it occur to him to suggest divorce, he a man so absorbed in a mine that he had forgotten how to live—merely out of consideration for a discarded wife whose existence he generally managed to forget? It was certainly odd, and its idiosyncrasies grew and swelled as she brooded. She wondered if she had been a fool. But who in heaven’s name could the woman be? Of course it was only a passing fancy, but could she wait, could she wait?

She was aroused by a slight cough, discreet but full of subtle insolence. She sprang to her feet, and Whalen smiled as he saw her drawn face and bloodshot eyes. He stood just within the door, and held a cap in his hand. He wore a light automobile coat; a pair of goggles only half covered his bulging brow. His upper teeth were clamped down over his lower lip, a habit when steadying his nerves. Ida thought she had never seen him look so hideous, so like a mongrel cur.

“What do you want?” she asked.

“How gracious you are! How like Mrs. Blake, who would not forget her manners if she——”

“I’ve got no manners for your sort. Get out.”

“Oh, not yet. I’ve something to say. I’ve waited for over a year, but my time has come——”

“You’ll go out the way you went last time if you don’t say what you’ve got to say pretty quick and get out by yourself.”

Whalen looked over his shoulder nervously, and measured the distance to the front door. He had asked leave of the maid to announce himself, and, when she had disappeared, reopened the door and left it ajar.

“It won’t take me long,” he said grimly. “It took me a little longer to tell Mrs. Blake, for she was hard to convince; but she was convinced before I left. It is merely this: I saw you go into Lord John Mowbray’s rooms on Monday night shortly after ten o’clock and come out at half-past one.”

“Oh, you did, did you? I had a feeling all the time there was a sneak in the neighbourhood. Well, much good your spying will do you. Lord John was at the Country Club until three in the morning and everybody knows it.”

She spoke calmly, but she was profoundly disturbed. She continued, however, in the same tones of cutting contempt, for she saw that he was taken aback, “I merely misunderstood an invitation of Lord John’s for a bridge party. I thought it was for that night, and although I was surprised to find myself the first and Lord John not there, I sat down to wait and fell asleep. I had had a hard day. I only condescend to explain,” she continued witheringly, “because you are as venomous as a mad dog and it is as well to muzzle you at once.”

“I don’t believe a word of that yarn, and neither will anyone else. I certainly managed to convince Mrs. Blake——”

“Not she. She must have laughed in your face——”

“Oh no! Not Mrs. Blake! But I will admit that it was not easy to make her believe ill of you. Perhaps I should not have succeeded, but when a woman is eager to believe——” He laughed and shrugged his shoulders; but once more he cast a quick glance at the line of retreat. The heavy library table was between them.

“What the devil do you mean?” Ida spoke roughly, but her heart began to hammer. She felt a sudden impulse to run away, but she stood rigidly and glared at him. “Here!” she continued, “come to the point. Spit out your poison. What particular object had you in trying to set my best friend against me? It would have been more like you to run to a newspaper.”

“That later. I wanted to do Mrs. Blake a good turn and at the same time let her be the one to tell your husband that he could secure his freedom without further delay——”

“What do you mean? What do you mean?” Ida’s eyes were staring as if they saw a vision of herself at the stake; she tossed off her pride as she would a hampering cloak. “Ora! Ora! Oh, not Ora! You liar!” she screamed. “Prove what you said quick——” But he saw that she had caught the edge of the table and that her body was swaying.

“Oh, neither will deny it now,” he replied in a tone of deadly quiet. “She went out there to be near him, no doubt of that; and he’s spent hours on end in that bungalow. I went to Helena and back with him and I guessed that something was up, for he was glummer and more disagreeable than usual; and this afternoon when I saw her come up out of his mine I guessed they had had a painful scene and parted. So I told her she had the game in her own hands, and that I’d go on the stand and swear to what I saw. No husband would believe anything but the truth, nor this town either. You might prove that your lord made a fool of you and amused himself elsewhere, but you’re done for all the same; and I guess Mr. Compton would manage his divorce all right. Then two people that are madly in love will be happy——”

Ida’s strength rushed back and the world turned scarlet. She picked up a heavy bronze from the table and hurled it at him. But Whalen was expecting a physical assault in some form. He ducked and fled. When she reached the open door he was not in sight.

XXIV

ORA watched the clock until twenty minutes after eleven.

The miners changed shift promptly, and the last should have gone down the Primo shaft by a quarter past at the latest. The shaft house would be empty, as no hoisting was being done on the night shift.

She turned out the light in her living-room, wrapped herself in a dark lodenmantel, a long cape with a hood that she had worn while climbing in Bavaria, and let herself out. She walked through the grove to the edge of the bluff above her camp and stood for a few moments, listening intently. Some ten minutes since she had heard the warning shriek of an automobile horn, but the garage of her manager, who had motored Whalen into Butte, was on the flat, and he had had time either to go down into the mine or climb to his own cottage.

The moon was at the full and the scene as sharply outlined as by day, although less animated. Save for the usual raucous noises of a mining camp the only sign of life was in the saloon. Some one was playing a pianola, and through the open door she saw men standing at the bar. For a moment she was tempted to take the surface path across the camps; but the risk was too great. Some one was sure to be abroad, and although she had been willing to brave the scorn of the world when there was no apparent alternative, she shrank from the plain Saxon the miners would use if they saw her. From Gregory’s shaft house she could reach his cabin by the path behind the abandoned cut.

A light was burning in her shaft house. She was not expert enough to descend the ladder candle in hand, and for a moment faltered above the darkness of the well; she had not been down before at night. Then she reflected that it was always night in the mines and descended without further hesitation.

At the foot of the shaft the usual station was one with the chamber left after removing the first large deposit of ore. They had merely cut through the vein at this point without stoping, and the great excavation had a lofty roof. Ora struck a match and lit a candle near by. On the day of the geologists’ visit a number of miner’s candlesticks had been thrust into what little wood there was in the chamber, and the candles were but half burnt out. Then she lit the one she had brought in her pocket. Accustomed as she was by this time to the route underground by chamber and gallery to the Perch mine, she always picked her way carefully, particularly down the first drift; her lessees, impatient at the leanness of the connecting vein, and not wishing to spend either the time or the money to sink the shaft another hundred feet, had understoped, and the holes were ill-covered.

She crossed the large black cavern toward the first of these tunnels, or drifts, sweeping the candle about her head, and then holding it downward, for she always feared cave-ins. The room was almost untimbered, owing to the hardness of the rock.

She had almost reached the mouth of the drift, when she paused suddenly, listened intently, and then blew out her candle. Some one was on the ladder. It was one of the miners, no doubt. Something had detained him above ground, and not daring to summon the shaft house man, he was sneaking down the ladder. He would go on down to the second level of the mine. Ora stood motionless, her hood pulled over her white face. Her miners were good average men, but the saloon flourished, and was no doubt responsible for the present delinquency.

Then once more she listened intently. The upper part of her body stiffened like a startled animal’s. Whoever was coming down was making his first descent by foot; not only was his progress slow, but he was breathing heavily, and hesitating between rungs, as if it were his first experience of an inclined ladder. Miners hate the shaft ladder, and will resort to any subterfuge to avoid it, but they are experts in “negotiating” it nevertheless. No doubt this was some green hand, recently employed. Or possibly the man was drunk.

Then suddenly Ora turned cold with the chill of the mine itself, a mere physical attribute that her warm blood had never deigned to notice before. A form was slowly coming into view below the high roof of the cavern, and although it was little more than a blot on the general blackness, Ora’s keen eyes, accustomed to the faint relief given by the candle near the shaft, noted as it descended further that it covered more of the ladder than it should. Miners are almost invariably thin and they wear overalls. This person wore a heavy cape like her own. But it was not alone the garment, which any miner would scorn, that betrayed the sex of the invader; it may have been the physical awkwardness, the shallow breathing, or some subtle psychical emanation—or all—that warned Ora of the approach not only of a woman but of a malignant force.

And this woman was following her. There was no doubt in her mind of that. She suffered a moment or two of furious unreasoning terror as she crouched against the wall and watched that shadow against a shadow slowly descend the final rungs of the ladder. Her first impulse had been to flee down the drift, but there was danger of falling into one of the gouge holes and disabling herself. She dared not relight her candle.

Shaking, terrified as she never had been in her life—for she was normally brave, and it was not a normal woman she feared but that aura of hate and lust for vengeance—undecided, putting up a frantic prayer that Gregory would come to her rescue, she pulled the hood over her face and almost sank to her knees. The woman, breathing heavily, reached the last rung and touched the ground as warily as a cat. For a moment she stood drawing in deep breaths like sighs, but which escaped, to tormented ears, like a hiss. Ora, her eyelids almost meeting over the intense concentration of her gaze, saw the woman fling back the mantle that covered her, throw out her arms as if to relax the muscles after the strain of the descent. Then she turned suddenly, snatched the candlestick from the wall and held it above her head.

For the moment Ora thought her heart had stopped. The woman was Ida. Her heavy lowered brows were like a heavy band across the white ghastliness of her face. Her eyes glittered horribly. Her lips were a mere tight line. Her black hair, loosened, fell over her face. Ora’s hypnotised gaze tore itself from those slowly moving eyes and lowered itself instinctively to Ida’s right hand. It held the stiletto she had given her in Genoa. The slanting rays of the candle fell on the jewels of the hilt. Then she knew that Ida had followed her down into the mine to kill her.

Her courage came back as quickly as it had fled. Ora’s brain might be democratic but her soul was haughty. The friendship of the past eighteen months between herself and this woman suddenly shaped itself as forced and artificial, and she was filled with a cold surprise and anger. Who was Ida Hook that she should presume to question Ora Stratton? Similar reflections, no doubt, stiffened many a noble when on his way to the guillotine at the behest of the canaille.

Ora was beyond the ray of the candle at present but Ida was beginning to move forward, her eyes almost blank in spite of their brilliancy, moving from side to side, striving to pierce the darkness, her head bent forward to catch the slightest sound. It was evident that she had seen Ora go into the shaft house, and knew that she could not be far off.

Ora took the automatic from the bag at her waist, pointed it at the roof of the cave and fired twice. The din was terrific in that confined space. Ida shrieked, dropped the stiletto and candle, and flung her arms about her head. Ora hastily lighted two other candles, and then retreated against the wall. She believed that the terrible inhibition in Ida’s tormented mind was shattered, but she kept the automatic in her hand, nevertheless.

The reverberations died away and once more the mine was as silent as only a deserted level of a mine can be. Ida raised her head and saw Ora. She gave a strangled cry and moved forward a step. Then her arms fell heavily to her side. She did not even pick up the dagger. The inhuman tension of her mind relaxed, the body barely had force enough to hold itself together.

“I came here to kill you,” she said. “But I can’t do it. I’ve been mad for hours, and I wish I could have found you in bed as I thought I would. I could have killed you then. But I saw you come down here—Have you told him?”

“No. He was down in the mine until eleven. I was on my way to tell him—to break down his resistance tonight!”

“His resistance?” Ida raised her head. She had lost the pitch necessary for murder, but her mind began to recover its alertness and her drooping body to set its springs in motion. “What do you mean by that? I thought he was in love with you.”

Ora laughed. She was filled with an utter despair, but the knife was still in Ida and she could turn it round. “Oh, yes, make no doubt of that. He loves me and will as long as he lives——”

“Not much he won’t!” roared Ida. “If I’ve been too quick for you you’ll never tell him now, and he practically gave me his word the other day that he’d never even ask me for a divorce again. That means you go and go quick, and if you think Gregory will have nothing to do but sit down and nurse your memory——”

The blood flew to Ora’s head and she hastily dropped the automatic into her bag. “I’ll not go!” she said. “And what is more I shall tell him. When Gregory knows that you spent three hours in Mowbray’s rooms at night——”

“Mowbray was not there! He was at the Country Club——”

“Was he?”

“Yes, and it can be proved. Moreover, you know me well enough——”

“It doesn’t matter what can be proved or what I believe. You waited for Mowbray—Do you suppose that Gregory—or any court of law——”

“My God!” cried Ida. “You! You! I think it was that drove me off my head more than the prospect of disgrace and losing Gregory. You! What in God’s name is possessing you? I always knew that you would be the concentrated essence of all damn fool women that ever lived when you did fall in love, but I never believed it was in you to do anything dishonourable——”

“And would you have believed that you, the concentrated essence of all that is cool, deliberate, calculating, would ever be inspired to commit murder? And for a man? What’s the use of talking? People possessed by love either are wholly themselves while it lasts, or are abnormal and should not be held accountable even to the law. I suppose this means that you too love Gregory Compton?”

“Yes it does!” cried Ida, the more vehemently because it shamed her to put this unwonted weakness into words. “I do, damn it all! I do. I thought I was immune, but I guess we are all born with the microbe and it bites when the soil is good and ready.” Her anger had vanished, for in spite of Ora’s defiance she knew that she was master of the situation. She kicked the stiletto contemptuously aside, clasped her hips with her large firm hands and threw back her shoulders. “Now!” she said, “admit right here that you know I didn’t go to Mowbray’s rooms for any old intrigue. That kind of thing isn’t in me and you know it.”

“I will confess I was surprised—I refused to believe it at first—Oh, I suppose I don’t. But it doesn’t matter——”

“Are you ready to come with me this minute to Gregory and tell him that yarn—knowing that I can prove Mowbray wasn’t there—I say go with me—not by yourself.”