visitors had slipped in through
the dusk, and were grouped about the tea-table, and that the Captain was
again the centre of an eager-eyed group. "They treat him as if he were
an Eskimo," she thought bitterly, and rose to join the circle and
protect him from their inquisition.

Haney was feeling extremely well, and talked with so much of his old
time vigor and slash of epithet that his little audience was quite
entranced. He enlarged upon the experiences of a year he had spent in
Alaska. "Mining up there in them days made gambling slow business," he
said. (He had told Bertha that he had made an attempt to get out of "the
trade," but she was content to have him put it on less self-righteous
grounds.) He contrived to make his hearers feel very keenly the
pitiless, long-drawn ferocity of that sunless winter. He made it plain
why men in that far land came together in vile dens to drink and gamble,
and Moss glowed with the wonder and delight of those great boys who
could rush away to the arctic edge of the world and die with laughing
curses on their lips.

"What did you all do it for?" he asked, bluntly. "For money?"

"Partly--but more for the love of doing something hard. No man but a
miser punishes himself for love of gold--it's for love of what the stuff
will buy, that men fight the snows."

While Haney talked of these things Bertha's eyes were musingly turned on
the face of the sculptor, and her mind was far from the scenes which
Mart so vividly described. This side of his life no longer amused
her--on the contrary she shrank from any disclosure of his savage
career. She was now as unjust in her criticism as she had been fond in
her admiration, and when with darkening brow she cut short his garrulous
flow of narrative Julia perceived her displeasure.

Haney apologized, handsomely. "It's natural for the ould bedraggled
eagle in the cage with a club on his wrist to dream of the circles he
used to cut and the fish he set claw to. In them days I feared no man's
weight, and no night or stream. 'Twas all joyous battle to me, and now,
as I sit here on velvet with only to snap me fingers for anything I
want, I look back at thim fierce old times with a sneaking kind o' wish
to live 'em all over again. Bertie knows me weakness. I would talk
forever did she lave me go on; but 'tis no blame to her--it was a cruel,
bad, careless life."

"When I come West," said Moss, sincerely, "we'll go camping together,
and every night by th