scoverer, and it was with something of the air of an art collector,
proudly extolling his choicest possession, that he turned his eyes from
it to Mary Warriner. The expression of admiration on her face, although
quiet and delicate, was quite satisfactory--for a moment only; and then
the denotement of delight passed out of her visage, as though expelled
by some physical pang. It was the suddenness of the change, for it was
of itself very slight, that made it perceptible. Gerald instinctively
turned to look for the cause.

Into the picture had come a human figure. A few yards in front of the
hut stood a man. In relation to the landscape far beyond he was
gigantic, and the shade of the trees made him devilishly black by
contrast with the sunlight of heaven that illumined the rest. He was
thus for an instant in silhouette, and it chanced that his sharp
outlines included a facial profile, with the points of a mustache and
beard giving satanic suggestion to an accidental attitude of malicious
intrusion. The illusion was almost startling, but it was momentary, and
then the form became the commonplace one of Tonio Ravelli, who walked
under the shelter.

"Do-a I eentrude?" he asked, with an Italian accent and an Italian
bearing. "I suppose no, eh? Thece ees a placa beesness."

Mary's small departure from a business-like perfunctory manner ended at
once. She took the scrap of paper which Ravelli laid on her desk, and
without a word translated its writing into telegraphic clicks. Ravelli
was a sub-contractor, and this was one of his frequent communications
with officials at the company's city office. The response was likely to
be immediate, and he waited for it.

"To get the full value of this view," Gerald Heath resumed, and now he
addressed himself to Mary directly, as though with almost a purpose of
ignoring Ravelli, to whose greeting he had barely responded, "you need
to come upon it suddenly--as I once did. We had been for months blasting
and digging through the mountain. Every day's duty in that hole was like
a spell of imprisonment in a dark, damp dungeon. And your men, Ravelli,
looked like a chain-gang of convicts."

"You woulda no dare say so mooch to their-a fa-ces," Ravelli retorted,
with an insolence that was unmistakably intentional.

"O, I didn't mean a reflection on them," said Gerald, disregarding the
other's quarrelsome aggressiveness. "We all look rascally in the mud,
drip, and grime of tunnel work. And you