was a typewritten communication from a firm of lawyers in Boston. He had casually noted the forwarding addresses on the envelope when they had given it to him at the postoffice in Pioche. At first he did not fully comprehend the words, so keen was his sense of the girl sitting with her hands clasped in her lap, her face a little pale, her eyes downcast. He reread it and handed it back.
"I congratulate you," he said. "A hundred thousand dollars is not to be despised." Despite himself, he could neither control his tone to firmness nor keep from it a certain harshness. Man fashion, he was eminently sorry for himself and he could not avoid the bitterness. For the air castles he had been building—oh, he had been building them—had shifted on their unstable foundations, dissolved like the mocking mirages of the desert, before he knew their full design. He had been a conceited fool—sure of her all along—thinking he had only to reach out and pluck the flower of her—when he was ready, when, in his pride, he could do so with gifts to offer.
And now he was too late. She was beyond his reach. Even if the gold was found and, in sudden revulsion, he lost all hope in it, she would go back, taking with her the furnishings that, after all, did not belong in this log house, back to where she belonged, to smile later at the little burst of pioneer spirit that had possessed her.
Her voice broke in on his sour musing.
"I really never knew her. I doubt if she saw me more than once or twice. She was a distant relative,
