!"

Hope's face was glowing with the unusual exercise, and her eyes were
brilliant. Her hair had slipped down beneath the visor of her helmet.

"I am so tired--and so hungry." She was laughing and looking directly
at Clay. "It has been a wonderful thing to have seen," she said,
tugging at her heavy gauntlet, "and to have done," she added. She
pulled off her glove and held out her hand to Clay, moist and scarred
with the pressure of the reins.

"Thank you," she said, simply.

The master of the mines took it with a quick rush of gratitude, and
looking into the girl's eyes, saw something there that startled him, so
that he glanced quickly past her at the circle of booted men grouped in
the door behind her. They were each smiling in appreciation of the
tableau; her father and Ted, MacWilliams and Kirkland, and all the
others who had helped him. They seemed to envy, but not to grudge, the
whole credit which the girl had given to him.

Clay thought, "Why could it not have been the other?" But he said
aloud, "Thank YOU. You have given me my reward."

Miss Langham looked down impatiently into the valley below, and found
that it seemed more hot and noisy, and more grimy than before.

VI

Clay believed that Alice Langham's visit to the mines had opened his
eyes fully to vast differences between them. He laughed and railed at
himself for having dared to imagine that he was in a position to care
for her. Confident as he was at times, and sure as he was of his
ability in certain directions, he was uneasy and fearful when he
matched himself against a man of gentle birth and gentle breeding, and
one who, like King, was part of a world of which he knew little, and to
which, in his ignorance concerning it, he attributed many advantages
that it did not possess. He believed that he would always lack the
mysterious something which these others held by right of inheritance.
He was still young and full of the illusions of youth, and so gave
false values to his own qualities, and values equally false to the
qualities he lacked. For the next week he avoided Miss Langham, unless
there were other people present, and whenever she showed him special
favor, he hastily recalled to his mind her failure to sympathize in his
work, and assured himself that if she could not interest herself in the
engineer, he did not care to have her interested in the man. Other
women had found him attractive in himself; they had cared for his